EHFA announced on 3 May 2011 that the fourth Executive Leadership Forum would meet in Barcelona on 8 and 9 June 2011. The notice described the event as by invitation only.
The forum series had begun in 2009, and it was a different kind of meeting from the European Fitness Forum. The fitness forums were open to the whole membership - training providers, educators, suppliers, national bodies - and met in a different city each year. The Executive Leadership Forum was smaller and closed, built around the people who ran the sector's largest operating groups. That was a deliberate choice about where the industry's direction was set. Decisions about how many staff a facility employs, what it pays them and what qualification it asks of them are taken at that level, and the forum was how the association put its standards and its plans in front of the people who take those decisions.
The 2011 forum met in Barcelona in a year when the association's work in Catalonia was moving quickly, with the Catalan sports professionals register allying with EREPS in June and a memorandum of cooperation with the Government of Catalunya following in September. See events for the calendar the forum sat in, and the first Executive Leadership Forum for the start of the series.