"The Birth and Rise of FC Barcelona from an Entrepreneurial History Approach, 1899-1922"

The aim of this proposal is to show how an entrepreneurial project that identifies a future form of value may not be motivated by the search for economic profit. Based on the postulates of the new entrepreneurial history established by Wadhwani and Lubinski (2017), the aim of the proposal is to analyse how the directors of a football/soccer club, FC Barcelona, imagined and valued opportunities and goals; how they mobilized and recombined resources to ensure that the club operated effectively; and how this new form of leisure was legitimized and eventually became fully professionalized. This three-pronged analysis is applied to the three main entrepreneurial momentums in the birth and early rise of FCB: (1) its creation in 1899; (2) the expansion strategy drawn up after the 1908 general assembly of members, when the club’s dissolution was planned; and (3) the decision to build a large stadium in the early 1920s. It was an entrepreneurial project deployed in a dynamic process based on trial and error (Popp and Holt, 2013). From uncertain beginnings, the club’s eventual consolidation led to long-term socio-economic change and presents the main characteristics of a Schumpeterian creative response since it was key in the introduction of a sport that changed the way in which leisure was consumed in Spain (Schumpeter, 1947). Pursuing a non-pecuniary purpose, the creation of FCB unleashed a form of value that ended up shaping a new industry, that of professional football, which generates an impact of billions of euros in Spain today. Therefore, this work shows how a project involving the mobilization of resources for a shared purpose can be characterized as entrepreneurial, even if it is not motivated by economic gain.