Barcelona election D-Day: Candidates must deliver signatures to Camp Nou

The first D-Day in the race to be Barcelona president is here. On Monday, the candidates must deliver their signed forms to the club. To take part in the election, they must have 2,257 signatures from club members (socios).

Any duplicates signatures will be automatically annulled and the club will work on verifying the signatures over the next three days. Once it's confirmed who has passed the cut, the official election campaign will run from Jan. 15 to Jan. 22, with the election on Jan. 24.

Sunday was a frenetic day at the headquarters of each candidates' campaign, even for Joan Laporta and Victor Font, the two big favourites. "A good amount of signatures arrive on the last day," said a source on Laporta's campaign, "because all those that have promised to bring signatures from other points in Catalonia arrive on the final day."

The pandemic and an unexpected storm have made it harder than expected for the candidates to get the signatures they need.

Some will have longer than others to get over the line because they have all been arrived a time slot to deliver their signed forms to the club, starting with Laporta (socio 13,352) at 5pm and followed every half hour by: Jordi Farré (socio 17.463) 5.30pm; Agustí Benedito (25.308), 6pm; Emili Rousaud (30.190), 6.30pm: Xavi Vilajoana (30.504), 7pm; Toni Freixa (54.786) 7.30pm; Víctor Font (67.970), 8pm; and Lluís Fernández Alá (81.319) 8.30pm.

Favourites

Laporta and Font are the stand out favourites and are easily capable of passing the cut. Rousaud assures he has more than 2,000 so if close and should pass. Toni Freixa has not given numbers and Xavi Vilajoana says he's waiting on "the return of forms" to make the number needed.

Benedito has opted for prudence and Fernandez Ala admitted publicly that he will struggle to make 2,257.

All the candidates know they will need to get more than the required amount of signatures, too, as some are always invalidated for various reasons. Looking at past elections, between 7 and 18 percent of signatures are usually deemed invalid.

"We have the signatures to pass the cut, but we're still working on a cushion to get past the margin of error," Rousaud has said. "We need another 150 to have a good cushion."

NEW FC BARCELONA PODCAST IN ENGLISH