BarcelonaBarça has a very clear goal for this 2022-23 season: to achieve the highest sponsorship income in the club’s history. This was announced before the last assembly by the economic vice-president Eduard Romeu, who set the bar above 200 million euros of annual income for this concept. During the last few months, the board of directors of Joan Laporta, with the vice-president of the marketing area Juli Guiu at the head, and the commercial department have taken steps forward in this regard. Arguably the most important was the deal with Spotify to put his name on the men’s and women’s first team football shirts, training clothes and Camp Nou.
But there have been others, such as the arrival of Bimbo as a global sponsor, which also appears on the sleeve of the women’s team, a sponsorship that will amount to between 3.5 and 4 million a year for Barça. In recent times, they have also landed the Catalan club Vegan Nation as a global sponsor and Heüra and GLS in the group of sponsors of the current European runner-up of the women’s Champions League. And the latest to arrive has been the Japanese gluten-free food brand ZENB, which Barça announced this Friday that it will become the club’s regional sponsor in Japan, the United States and the United Kingdom until June 30, 2026 .
In any case, Barça continues to not specify the major category of sponsorship that has been free since the summer of 2021, when the Turkish appliance brand Beko ended its relationship with the club: the left sleeve of the men’s first team. A few days ago RAC1 announced that Nexo, the largest lending institution in the digital finance sector, was chosen to fill this vacancy.
But, as the ARA has been able to learn from sources familiar with the negotiations, for the moment the sponsorship has not been closed because there is a sector of the board, of which the institutional vice president Maria Elena Fort is a part, that does not see clearly the ‘alliance with a company in the cryptocurrency sector, which they consider speculative, risky, highly variable and unethical. On the other hand, another sector of the Culer dome, of which the economic vice-president Eduard Romeu is a part, considers it advisable to go ahead with an offer like this. The intention of the Laporta board is to get between 15 and 20 million per year for this asset (Beko was paying 9 before the pandemic), and so far only cryptocurrency companies have reached these amounts. At the moment, the internal debate is broken by the president Joan Laporta, who also does not see the association with this sector clearly, the determining fact that is preventing the negotiations from going forward for the time being.
Sponsorship with WhiteBIT was also ruled out
In fact, the situation with Nexo is the same that took place in the summer with WhiteBIT, another cryptocurrency company (created in Ukraine) with which the agreement to sponsor the left sleeve was practically taken for granted . Then the board of Laporta decided to pull back the negotiations for the same reasons now presented by the sector opposed to the association with this sector. This has, in the past, also led to the rejection of offers from the cryptocurrency world for the front of the shirt that were more financially attractive than the one that ultimately closed with Spotify.
