Barça-Spotify, official agreement for the men’s and women’s shirts and the name of the Camp Nou

The club did not want to reveal the financial terms of the agreement under a confidentiality clause for the new sponsor, although it could exceed 60 million euros per season including all concepts.

From Unicef ​​to Spotify

Just the day after the Professional Football League (LFP) announced that the club’s salary cap is negative at 144 million euros, Laporta made official the first major sponsorship deal of his second term, which will change the name of the stadium. From July it will be called Spotify Camp Nou.

The agreement with the sponsor is for four years. But the men’s and women’s jerseys will be for the next three seasons.

“We are proud to announce a pioneering alliance like this,” said Laporta, boasting of a pact with Spotify. “A worldwide reference entity. This union will allow us to keep the club closer to our fans and make them feel part of the Barça family “, said the manager.

In the first, from 2003 to 2010, the leader then linked Barça with Unicef, contributing even 1.5 million euros. Now it’s Spotify. And the deal, the financial details of which are unknown at this time, spans three seasons.

Assembly, April 3rd

The Barça club now joins the Swedish multinational, which, as it calls itself, is “a digital music, podcast and video service that gives you access to millions of songs and other content from creators around the world.” .

It includes the men’s t-shirt, for which Rakuten he paid 55 million in his first four years of contract and now due to the pandemic, 30 in the fifth and final year. Also part of the deal is the women’s t-shirt, for which Stanley he paid 3.5 million a year, and the name at the Camp Nou, initially estimated at 20 million, in addition to the training shirt for which Beko paid 10 per season.

All this agreement must be validated by an assembly of delegates, which will take place on April 3 electronically, the same process used in the Espai Barça referendum. That was a vote, but it was not, however, a telematic assembly, so it will be the first that the club will live in its history.

After Rakuten’s refusal to follow the sponsorship of the shirt, signed in 2017 with the directive of Bartomeu, the board set to work on finding a new trading partner by rejecting some proposals linked to the cryptocurrency sector.

In the end, an agreement was reached with Spotify in a unique association in the world of football, which provides Barça with visibility in the youth market, as well as opening new avenues for business.

A year of research

This is the most important agreement signed by the board of directors Laporta when he has not been in office for a year. And it is also a historical link because the name of the Camp Nou is placed, something that had not happened since 1957 when the stadium was erected. In addition, the link with the Swedish multinational, which is initially three years old, will include the construction of the Espai Barça.

After almost a year of searching for Rakuten’s replacement, who extended the agreement signed in 2016 for 12 months, but in much lower conditions for Barça due to the impact of the pandemic (it went from 55 million to 30 million ‘annual), the club has found the club’s second largest partner after Nike. Spotify will therefore become the fifth sponsor of the Barça shirt.

Unicef, Qatar, Rakuten and Spotify

In 2006, and after a pioneering initiative, theUnicef became the first thanks to the initiative of Joan Laporta at the beginning of his first term. But the club did not receive anything in return because it disseminated the social work in favor of children by paying these 1.5 million euros.

He arrived then Sandro Rossell to the presidency of Barça and opted to ally with Qatar, which provoked a heated social response, although at that time its board endorsed that it was the ‘Qatar Foundation’.

It barely lasted two years because then the name ‘Qatar Airways’ appeared on the Barça shirt after the global contract amounted to 170 million for six years.

After Qatar, and already with Josep Maria Bartomeu At the Camp Nou box office as president, the path of Rakuten appeared, sponsored, as the same leader acknowledged, by the intervention of Gerard Piqué, close friend of Hiroshi Mikitani, founder and CEO of the Japanese multinational dedicated to e-commerce.

Now the fifth is Spotify. This is his first big foray into the world of football. Already tried, through an offer of Daniel Ek, its confusing and current CEO of the Swedish multinational, buy Arsenal.

He wanted to take control of the London club, of which Ek he has been a passionate amateur since childhood, but he did not succeed. In May 2021, Arsenal, the owner and largest shareholder of which is the US billionaire Stan Kroenke, rejected this Spotify approach.

That’s when Daniel Ek he knew that Barça was looking for a new partner. And in the end, they allied themselves, causing Laporta to move from Unicef-2006 to Spotify-2022, although along the way there was the resignation of Ferran Reverter, the club’s CEO.