Elena Fort
Maria Elena Fort i Cisneros is a Spanish Catalan lawyer, football executive and politician, Institutional Vice President of FC Barcelona and spokeswoman of the Board of Directors since 2021 under the presidency of Joan Laporta. She has also served twice as member of the Parliament of Catalonia.
Career
Fort was born in 1970 in Barcelona, Spain. She got a degree in law for the University of Barcelona.She specialised in public law and urban planning, founding the law firm BRF Abogados SLP in 1996. Fort is a member of the Barcelona Bar Association.
Executive of FC Barcelona
In 2008, FC Barcelona president Joan Laporta called her to join the Board of Directors following the mass resignation of executives, and entrusted her with institutional and heritage matters, an office Fort held until 2010 when Laporta left the presidency. She subsequently confronted the new Board of Directors over the suspicious handling of the club's accounts, which ended up in court, a fact that put Fort under pressure and in the liability proceedings.She was part of Laporta's candidacy in the 2015 FC Barcelona presidential election, which Josep Maria Bartomeu won.
Laporta ran again for the presidency of Barça in the 2021 elections, with Fort as member of his candidacy which he presented in December 2020. During the campaign, Fort defended the existence of gender quotas and championed the role of women at FC Barcelona as well as the desire for a female president. Following Laporta's victory on 24 January 2021, Fort took office as the only woman on the board of FC Barcelona. On 19 March 2021, Fort was appointed by the Board as the new Institutional Vice President of the club, succeeding Pau Vilanova Vila-Abadal, and on 31 March became its spokeswoman.
In November 2025, Fort refused to rename Camp Nou after Leo Messi saying that there were better ways to honour him.
Following FC Barcelona's indictment in the Negreira case at the end of 2025, Fort was called to appear before the judge on 27 January 2026 as its representative.