Joan Laporta is standing on a box. “If I become the president of Barcelona again,” he promises, “I’ll make sure that we keep on winning, I’ll revive La Masía and I’ll lay the foundations for another decade of success. With me as president, Messi will always be happy and Unicef will return to the shirt.” On he goes, hands underlining each point, gaze fixed. “That’s why I’m asking for your vote,” he says, drawing towards a close. “Thank you very much. Visca Barça y visca Catalunya!”

There is a pause and then Laporta says: “Was that OK?”

“Perfect.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“Sure.”

Joan Oliver is sitting a few feet away. Rafa Yuste stands to his right, a motorbike helmet hooked over his arm. Jordi Finestres is on the other side of the room. They huddle close now to watch the tape back, peering down the viewfinder at Laporta’s last video appeal before elections on Saturday in which 109,637 Barcelona socis will have the right to vote on their new president. “OK,” he says. “OK”, they agree. And with that, the lights are turned back on at Carrer Provença 300, Laporta’s campaign HQ.

Outside, there is a queue to get into Gaudí’s most famous construction, the stunning Pedrera, which sits just across the road. Inside, Laporta looks out from posters. “Pel Barça,” the slogan runs: for Barça. Small photos have been stuck up, Laporta posing with supporters who have dropped in. They have left post-it notes, reasons why they will vote for him. “Because I always have.” “Because he’s the best.” “Because he’s faithful to his principles.” “Because he’s collonut”, the bollocks.

Joan Laporta in good spirits in the final week of his campaigning. Photograph: Manel Montilla for the Guardian

Giant prints cover one wall; the league, the European Cup and a gigantic Catalan flag, sporting success and political symbolism. TV screens are on a loop, Pep Guardiola sprinting down the Stamford Bridge touchline. There are Laporta leaflets and Laporta badges. There is a table football too. The opponents are Real Madrid and Barcelona line up in a rigid 4-3-3. In a backroom a trestle table is lined with laptops and slogans have gone up. One says “win” in English. The front desk is manned by volunteers wearing blue T-shirts with yellow writing: “I’m with Laporta.”

In total, there are well over 500 volunteers. There are seven people looking after media enquiries and the campaign strategy is worked out by Laporta, his director of communications Finestres and Oliver, the director general when he was last president and ready to occupy the same role this time. It is not just Laporta: every candidate has a campaign HQ in the city centre with large political teams behind them.

To stand, candidates had to collect 2,534 signatures – Laporta gathered 4,272; his main opponent Josep Maria Bartomeu 8,554 – and secure a bank guarantee covering 15% of the club’s budget, around €77m (£53.5m). Then there is the cost of the campaign itself. Just setting up a stall outside the Camp Nou costs €6,000; an SMS campaign using the club’s database of members, costs €8,000.

Despite the relatively small electorate, Barcelona’s elections are huge and are carried out like a political campaign. They are a political campaign. It is the morning after the only televised debate involving all four candidates: Laporta, Toni Freixa, Agustí Benedito and the outgoing president Bartomeu, who had refused to attend the previous debates. Two hours long, it took a prime time slot on TV3, Catalonia’s main channel. Elections occupy much of the media.

Barcelona fans have left messages on Post-it notes for Laporta at Carrer Provença 300, his campaign HQ. Photograph: Sid Lowe for the Guardian

At Carrer Provença, 300, the activity is frenetic. For Laporta, at least. For others, there is a lot of waiting around. Demetrio Albertini, his proposed director of institutional affairs, spends much of the morning playing with his phone, bored. Behind the scenes there is work to be done too: these are decisive days and rumours of pacts circulate, tactics and messages shifting with the campaign. Video done, Laporta and his team disappear downstairs, away from the visible activity. Outside, Oliver and Finestres stand in the shade, whispering animatedly.

Most days there are visits to supporters’ clubs and Laporta, like his opponents, has travelled Catalonia. Charismatic and charming, he is a natural. Today it’s all in the city and more about the media, one interview after the other. It is well over 30 degrees and Finestres looks frazzled.

But Laporta insists: “You never get tired. When you reach the end, it all floods out, but during the campaign the adrenaline’s such that you feel awake, lucid. We’ve got a lot on today and I haven’t slept much but I don’t feel it. During the elections I normally sleep five hours but last night was three. We finished the debate late and then I went back to the HQ to greet everyone celebrating that it had gone well.”

Laporta’s remark surprises. Sport newspaper called the debate a “non fight” and he did not appear to have emerged stronger. It was the only opportunity to properly go for Bartomeu, the favourite, or to lay an ace, some game-changing policy or signing, but Laporta did not do so. Instead, it was Freixa and Benedito, neither of whom will win, who waded in. For Laporta, the animosity remains intense, palpable in interviews and private conversations, and he had the ammunition, so his relative tranquillity was unexpected. Some considered it out of character. Where was the man they knew and expected?

The way he presents it now, the morning after the night before, the decision was conscious. “When you’ve been president, you can’t act like an outsider; it would be ridiculous,” he says. “We are carefully tracking everything, we can see the reaction to each moment, and experience has made me calmer. I could see the way the debate was going and I preferred to explain my programme. People said, ‘where’s the bombshell?’ The bombshell is my programme.”

From left to right: Alexanko, Yuste, Laporta, Abidal and Albertini. Photograph: Manel Montilla for the Guardian

Yet we did expect an ace up the sleeve. “Ace? My programme is a straight flush, hombre,” Laporta replies.

These are atypical elections, ones where the turnout may be low and the “need” for change appears to be felt less keenly: “because the fans are happy,” as Bartomeu quite accurately put it. There is tax fraud charge against Bartomeu and his predecessor Sandro Rosell – who both deny wrongdoing – over the signing of Neymar, Qatar on the shirt, the FIFA ban, Messi’s difficult relationship with the board (Laporta has sought to present Messi as his). And yet, while elections were called during a crisis in January, by the end of the season Barcelona had won it all. Add the fact that they have a signings ban until January and that changes things.

Every candidate has their own sporting director and some names have been offered up, with Laporta insisting he is best placed to sign Paul Pogba (something the player’s agent, Mino Raiola, confirmed the following night), but they have all accepted Luis Enrique as their manager. Those normal vote-winning names – a new team, a new manager – are denied. And how do you attack a president under whom they have won it all? Politically, the treble was bad news for the opposition.

“If we had not won the treble, these elections would have been very different,” Laporta concedes. “But I’m a Barcelona fan. I much prefer to have won the treble. Besides, it becomes more about projects this way and people can see that Bartomeu doesn’t have a sustainable model. People see a president who called elections because he was under pressure, who sacked the sporting director, who was on the verge of sacking the manager, and who conducted a poll about selling Messi.”

Even in the table football, Barcelona line up in a rigid 4-3-3. Photograph: Sid Lowe for the Guardian

For Laporta, the analysis is not just about programmes but about the electorate and this brings him back to his apparent caution in the debate. He is the most overtly ideologically driven of the candidates, committed to the ideal of “more than a club”, which he defines as “Catalonia, Cruyff, cantera [the youth system], and Unicef.” In short, the popular image of Barça, certainly from the outside. But the reality is different: there lies at the heart of the club a huge conservative mass of support. Without that, it is impossible to explain José Luis Nuñez being president between 1978 and 2000. And that constituency belongs more naturally to Bartomeu.

“In 2003, we led a revolution which was a generational one too and the polls now show that younger voters are mine,” Laporta says. “It’s the older ones, the undecided, we’ve been trying to convince. The conservative doesn’t naturally vote for me, the conservative media attacks me, and with the sporting success, it’s harder still. But they’re starting to see that the sporting model was actually built by us; [Bartomeu’s] contradictions are so great that even they see it. And on top of it all, we had a president who has been charged with fraud.”

“We were second but rising, we were reaching the socis. Now we’re ahead. I go into every interview determined to express my message clearly, outlining the seven pillars, regardless of the interviewer’s intentions. If we can keep reinforcing those ideas, the seriousness, the experience, we have a chance.”

And so they do. Marca are next at the HQ. The interview is short on questions, long on answers. Chevrolet and Manchester United come up a couple of times: how, Laporta says, can Bartomeu claim that Qatar is the only option for sponsorship? He describes Barcelona and Unicef as a “beautiful story of sensitivity and solidarity.” And he says he can’t let Bartomeu win, the man who “publicly said he would renew [cancer sufferer] Eric Abidal’s contract and then didn’t…”

Abidal is Laporta’s sporting director now.

Joan Laporta is standing against Toni Freixa, Agustí Benedito and the outgoing president Josep Maria Bartomeu. Photograph: Manel Montilla for the Guardian

The interview ends. Outside the car waits. It is early evening and Laporta dashes across the road and, stopping for photos while tourists alongside La Pedrera try to work out who he is, climbs in the back. Yuste sits in the front. The driver sets off with a door still open, before braking sharply. It is pulled shut and the car pulls away. Laporta settles in. A little quiet, a moment’s isolation. Time to reflect.

How did four men who were on the electoral ticket together in 2003 become opponents, rivals, even enemies? Where did the conflict begin and how did it end up paralleling, maybe even reopening, a civil war that goes back a quarter of a century? Josep Lluís Núñez versus Johan Cruyff by another name. When it comes to Sandro Rosell, Laporta’s vice-president in 2003, and Rosell’s own vice-president Bartomeu, the mutual hatred between them and Laporta is intense. Fear and loathing on the campaign trail. How did it come to this?

“I have the same principles since 2003. Look at who changed theirs,” Laporta insists. “There are people with me in 2003, who now renounce Cruyff; people with me in 2003 who prefer Qatar to Unicef; people who were with me in 2003 who now support Núñez – a man sent down for fraud. People change but, actually, I think this goes to the origins. Deep down, they were infiltrators in the revolution we led in 2003.

“It’s more nuanced than Cruyff versus Núñez but that’s one way of explaining it,” he continues, drawing a spectrum on a blue notebook. “It reflects Catalan society: you have a Spanish-unionist strand and a Catalanist-separatist strand.

Joan Laporta does some exercises in front of the cameras. Photograph: Sid Lowe for the Guardian

“Núñez would be over here,” he says pointing to the right. “The Cruyffists would be over here,” he continues, pointing to the other side. “The majority of us Cruyffists are separatists or at least Catalanists; the majority of those identified with Núñez are unionists. Those twin identities tend to go hand in hand, although there are always exceptions, and there’s always a political element. People who say there’s not, lie. Sport’s always political and here it’s more complex because we’re a nation without a state. The normal thing would be left-right, but the lines are drawn differently here.”

“Beyond that, as a club we are closer to democratic ideals than most, and although elections can create instability and exacerbate divisions, they are a wonderful thing.”

Laporta looks out the window. “Marc, where are you going?”

“To the telly ... to TVE.”

“No, no, Marc. We’re going to TV3. And first we’re going home.”

The car pulls up outside Laporta’s flat on Avinguda Diagonal, a short walk from the Camp Nou, around 7.30pm. Upstairs his son is revising for an exam. On the shelves are volumes on Catalan art and architecture. Don Quixote is there too. Laporta goes to change, appearing on the terrace in shorts, trainers and a bright orange T-shirt. A photographer from La Vanguardia is coming; they are shooting every candidate away from the campaign. “But right now everything is the campaign,” Finestres protests.

In the end they decided to photograph Laporta working out. There is not actually time for it, but he can pretend. He has a knee injury, sustained playing football, which stops him running, so exercise ropes hang from the roof and he messes about on them while he’s waiting. The photographer arrives and so does Amina, Laporta’s personal trainer. “She’s a miracle: in two weeks she got me fit,” he grins. He lifts 3kg weights into the sky, smiling. Click, click, and it is done.

Laporta is not. Another suit and back down to the car. Two more interviews await, the 10th and 11th, both recorded at TV3. These ones really matter. With a single day of full campaigning left, one poll suggests he may now be level with Bartomeu, closer to returning to the presidency than ever. TV3 is Bartomeu’s territory, but the audience is Laporta’s target. It is large too. He has to get this right.

Joan Laporta speaks at a meal with Barça fans at Da Greco restaurant. Photograph: Isabella Antonelli for Joan Laporta

It is not long after 10pm when he arrives for a meal with Barcelona supporters at Da Greco, one of the city’s most emblematic restaurants, with its slightly kitsch pseudo-classic Roman decor. The food is good but some of his campaign team would rather be at home asleep. This, though, is part of the programme. And, besides, Laporta arrives wearing a huge grin and embraces the guests. “Subidón, tío,” whispers Finestres. On a high.

So, how was it at the telly? Laporta smiles. “Bloody brilliant.”