The TV documentary ‘FC Barcelona Confidential (Barça! The Inside Story)’, which had cameras shooting film on Laporta’s first year in charge at the club, didn’t to my mind provide sufficient evidence of Laporta’s more megalomaniac approach to football club management. Back then, a strong desire to exert greater fiscal control and a healthy appetite for fine dining were much more to the fore. As was the need to bring some new silverware to several dusty cabinets at the club. But as time has gone by, and despite winning Spain’s La Liga last season, increasing disenchantment with Laporta’s ways and means has grown in line with his waist size and PR cock-ups.

The 43-year-old Laporta, a lawyer with his own law firm, Laporta & Arbós Abogados Asociados, and a man unafraid of mixing Catalan politics and nationalist symbolism with a club whose many supporters outside Catalonia, and the non-Catalans within, are unlikely to give dos burros catalánes about, was elected as president of the club after an election on 15 June 2003. Running on a platform which promised to bring a bit of glamour back to the club - ‘vote for me and I'll buy David Beckham’, he said, even though the England captain had decided on joining Los Galácticos at the Bernabeu - and in the end only having to settle for second-best in someone who has gone on to become arguably the world’s best footballer, the Brazilian Ronaldinho, Laporta’s 2005 can accurately be described as his own annus horribilis.

He’s certainly had his hands full during the year, dealing with problems and setbacks which, for the most part, have been self-inflicted: either by himself or those close to him from within the club. Combined, they have done him, the club and the reputation of both some considerable damage to their respective standings.

Where better to start with Laporta’s travails than the decision of the club to give the go-ahead for an overt pre-match show of Catalanismo shortly before the kick-off of an FC Barcelona .v. Osasuna football match in the Camp Nou back in October. This particularly assertive demonstration of Catalan pride and aspiration was organised by the Coordinadora d'Associacions per la Llengua Catalana (CAL), a body promoting and supporting efforts to reinforce, well, all things Catalan, and came at a time when national debate on Catalan statute reform was reaching a peak. In support of their message, CAL displayed a sizeable banner on the pitch which represented what Catalan nationalists believe to be parts of Spain, along other countries and regions, they feel form part of a ‘greater Catalonia’ - the so-called ‘Països Catalans’ - which includes (as well as a part of southern France, Andorra, Aragon and the Balearics), the autonomous community of Valencia.

On any other day, one could have said ‘so what - they’re just preaching before the choir. Tell me something new …’. But not that day. Not only were they giving what they thought most present wanted to hear, their message also went out live on TV to all the other autonomous regions in Spain who were broadcasting the match and, unfortunately, gave a sizeable number of Valencianos something they certainly didn’t want see or hear.

The result? Lots of political fallout and name-calling. Francisco Camps, President of the Generalitat de Valencia, called for a change in legislation to ‘prevent such a lamentable incident from happening again’. He demanded that ‘someone will have to answer to this effrontery to the Spanish constitution and to the deep feeling of the Valencian people’. Joan Ignasi Pla, Secretrary General of the PSPV-PSOE, spoke of the ‘offence and insult’ the display caused.

Despite denials from the club, and given Laporta’s oft-publicised tendency toward autocratic behaviour, regular Barça club watchers will find it difficult to believe that Laporta or those close to him would have sanctioned the display without knowing what was going to be served up to the public at large.

Laporta’s management style was one of the key reasons behind the decision of right-hand-man and Barça VP Sandro Rosell to resign from the club at the start of June. In a statement to the press he said that it’s a ‘management without transparency and democracy’, and that he’d ‘wasted hours on a project that the president has strayed from’. Rosell also felt that Johan Cruyff, who still has close ties with the club but does not hold any official post, was bringing his - in Rosell’s opinion - detrimental influence to bear upon Laporta.

Rosell’s move to leave came after the same decision to jump ship in May was made by Jordi Mones, the man responsible for medical services at the club, who also cited having difficulties adjusting to Laporta’s authoritarian style. Other board members did too, as more resignations later followed. Laporta’s very public response was to tell the local El Periódico newspaper that Rosell had ‘been preparing a very clear strategy to abandon the board so as to prepare his own candidacy for the next elections’ and that ‘his aim was to break up the project, make me lose face personally and as a result prejudice the club’.

To waiting passengers at Barcelona’s El Prat airport during July, the club President did seem to have lost the plot when he let the red mist descend during an incident with a totally-out-of-his-control airport metal detector. Displaying behaviour worthy of a five-year-old, and born of frustration from having been thrice beeped by the over zealous metal detector, the president, of what many consider to be the biggest football club in the world, kicked off his shoes and detrousered before indignantly striding through the now beep-free detector in his underwear. The sports newspaper paper Marca carried an apology from Laporta over the incident: ‘I would like to apologise if any Barcelona fan felt offended’. He added ‘I would like to make it clear though that I did not lose my head nor did I insult anyone ... but I am really sorry that the incident caused such a fuss’. Yes, quite.

Joan Laporta’s personal integrity has also been brought into question when it was discovered that Alejandro Echevarría, Laporta’s brother-in-law and FC Barcelona director, had in fact been a member of the Fundación Nacional Francisco Franco (FNFF), an organisation set up to honour the memory of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Laporta had earlier stated for the record that Echevarría ‘is not, never has been and never will be a member of that foundation’. The club president is also reported to have said that ‘Echevarría can't possibly be a Francoist because he was only ten when Franco died’.

Just as embarrassing as the revelation itself, so was the back-peddling apology and subsequent acceptance of Echevarría’s resignation because it was, he told Catalan TV station TV3, ‘in the best interests of the club’. Not quite of Watergate proportions, but still worthy of the question being asked: what did the president know and when did he know it? Suspicions remain over whether Laporta knew all along but wanted to hide the association between the FNFF and what can be described in certain quarters as an antidote to Spanish state influence.

And if all that wasn’t enough, it’s worth noting what a mess the club has made of enabling Argentine wonderkid Lionel Messi to play in the national league; the disgraceful treatment handed out to another Argentine and Barça crowd favourite Javier Saviola; the upset caused with Barcelona’s other major football club, RCD Espanyol, over the Saviola affair; the on-off €20m or so shirt sponsorship deal with the Chinese government and Beijing 2008 Olympic Games organisers; and the decision by the Audiència Provincial de Barcelona forcing Laporta to provide access to the due diligence report put together by Deloitte Touche, to two of its members (Robert Blanch del Toro and Francesc Gordo Guarinos), who had been prevented from exercising their membership rights in seeking a review of the document produced by the auditors.

We keep being told that FC Barcelona is ‘mes qué un club’. With its politically involved and self-styled Catalanista, perhaps Laporta has listened to his own hype and believes that it is in fact he who is more than the club.