BarcelonaWork is accumulating in Barça’s offices as summer approaches and the end of the financial year. Beyond next season’s sports planning, Barça’s executives and managers are working hard on various portfolios to alleviate the still serious financial situation. Barça have three possible levers in their hands to avoid closing a loss-making balance sheet on 30 June: closing the agreement with CVC and selling up to 49% of Barça Licensing & Merchandising and Barça Studios.
The club, at the moment, is not getting the revenue it had planned for this season – one of the big legs in which it is short is in raising money on match days – and the president Joan Laporta, who has carried out an important change in the structure of the commercial area, led since April by Sergi Ricart, has to turn the situation between the eyebrows. The lever closest to Barça is to execute, as the portal put it 2Playbook, is the 49% capitalization of Barça Licensing & Merchandising (BLM), the club’s subsidiary company that is dedicated, among other things, to exploiting the t-shirt business and merchandising related to the Barça universe. The entity would temporarily and partially divest a segment that would be ceded to the consortium made up of Fanatics and Investindustrial, in exchange for about 200 million euros.
In addition, work is underway to increase sponsorship revenue after closing the main one with Spotify, which will involve 57.5 million euros a year, more variable fixed for the fronts of the men’s and women’s first team jerseys. training clothes and title rights of the Camp Nou. Now the big asset that remains free is the left sleeve of the shirt, with which Barça aims to get around 15 million euros a year in exchange for a brand putting the logo on it.
Polkadot wants the sponsorship of the sleeve
Several companies have been very interested in it in recent months. Among them, those related to cryptocurrencies. Polkadot, as ARA has learned, is one of the names that sounds. While the board did not look favorably on partnering with this industry for strategic sponsorship like the one it closed with Spotify, despite offering more money, this time it is more open to hearing offers. At least a part led by Laporta himself, who is being reluctant by other executives. Companies in the technology, tourism, aviation and automotive sectors have also been interested in the sleeve.
Negotiations had stalled in recent weeks and it was not even ruled out starting the 2022-23 school year without a sponsor in the sleeve, but it was Laporta himself who now took the pan by the handle to reactivate them with the new commercial department and the facts could be accelerated. The sponsorship of the sleeve has been free since the summer of 2021 due to the resignation of Beko, from whom the Barça club had earned 9 million per season. Now the amount sought is far more ambitious. One of the main arguments that Barça has for raising the figure to 15 million is the association with Spotify, but also the fact that it wants to include the sleeve of the women’s team. In any case, this potential income would not count in Barça’s numbers until next year.
Barça Studios, the poor brother
Experts say that BLM has a lot of economic potential, but they do not think the same of Barça Studios, the audiovisual business that the club also transferred to a commercial company. Laporta’s idea is also to sell 49% to a third party. The problem is that there is currently no one to offer the figures that the entity would like because it is still a business that has to grow and that faces important restrictions, such as not having the image rights of most players. of the template. However, one of the solutions that Barça has devised to increase its short-term value is to include NFTs (collectible digital files) and metavers, as reported by the newspaper Sport. And this is where the Polkadot company comes into play again, which at the time was already interested in the front of the shirt and could now recover from the pumpkins with a double: sleeve and Barça Studios.
