A small advert in a sports newspaper and a meeting of eleven people in a gym were enough for Barcelona to be born. It was 29 November 1899, and the club founded that day turns 127 this year. Along the way it became the symbol of an entire region, yet it never lost the two colours it chose in its first steps. This is a story best told through the shirt.

An advert in Los Deportes

The Swiss Hans Gamper, later known as Joan Gamper, placed an advert in the newspaper Los Deportes on 22 October 1899, looking for people who wanted to play football. The response came quickly. On 29 November, at the Gimnasio Solé, eleven players founded Foot-Ball Club Barcelona. Among them were Catalans, Swiss and Britons, which would also play a part in the choice of colours.

The blaugrana mystery

The blue and deep red, known as blaugrana, were chosen at a second members' meeting on 13 December 1899. But where did they come from? Many theories have been put forward: an accountant's pens with blue and red ink, the colours of Gamper's Swiss canton, FC Basel. The club itself rejects the canton story and considers the version of the Witty brothers the most likely. They had attended Merchant Taylors school in Crosby, near Liverpool, whose rugby team wore blue and maroon. The evidence rests on oral accounts, not written records. For about ten years the striped shirts were worn with white shorts.

A crest that outlasted a dictatorship

At first the team used the coat of arms of the city of Barcelona. In 1910 a competition was held and the winner was Carles Comamala, one of the club's players. His design, with the St George's Cross, the red and yellow bars of Catalonia, the initials FCB and a ball, is essentially the crest we see today. Under Franco the club was forced to change its name to CF Barcelona and remove two of the four bars. The bars returned in 1949, for the 50th anniversary, and the FCB initials in 1974. In 2002 designer Claret Serrahima made the lines simpler and cleaner.

The culés and the grounds

The club's fans are called culés, from the Catalan word for backside. At the Camp de la Indústria, where the team moved in 1909, spectators sitting on top of the stand's wall showed passers-by exactly that part of themselves. Les Corts followed in 1922 and, in 1957, the Camp Nou, which after its refurbishment now carries the name Spotify Camp Nou. The motto "Més que un club", "More than a club", expresses the team's bond with Catalan identity. Barcelona is owned by its members.

107 years without a sponsor

For more than a century the front of the shirt stayed clean. In September 2006 the club agreed to carry the UNICEF logo, with a twist: instead of being paid, it committed to giving the organisation at least 1.5 million euros a year. The Qatar Foundation followed in 2011, then Qatar Airways, Rakuten and, from 2022, Spotify. Among the kit makers, after Meyba in the 1980s and Kappa in 1992-1998, Nike took over in 1998.

From Koeman's Wembley to the sextuple

Johan Cruyff built the so-called Dream Team from 1988, winning four league titles in a row between 1991 and 1994. In 1992, at Wembley, a free kick by Ronald Koeman against Sampdoria gave the club its first European Cup. The titles of 2006, 2009, 2011 and 2015 followed, five in total. In 2009 Barcelona became the first European team to win six competitions in a single year. Anyone who wants to remember those nights can take a look at the Barcelona Champions League winners set of 5 pins.

Happy birthday, Barça. From the eleven men of the Gimnasio Solé to the packed stands of today, the blue and the garnet remain the same.

See Barcelona shirts and merchandise at sportarena.gr.

Photo: Camp Nou – Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez (Lmbuga), Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.