Laporta agrees to sell the shirt sleeve for less than he expected

BarcelonaThe search has lasted two years. In the summer of 2021, the appliance brand Beko stopped sponsoring the left sleeve of the Barça shirt, for which it paid 9 million euros per year (19 including training clothes). Then, Joan Laporta’s board, which had just arrived at the Camp Nou box office, set out to get a sponsor for the sleeve that brought in between 15 and 20 million euros per year. But the departure of Leo Messi and the two consecutive defeats in the group stage of the Champions League, in addition to the institutional conflicts suffered by the Catalan entity, complicated the situation. Despite this, during this period the offices of Arístides Maillol have received offers that met numerical expectations. The problem is that they came from a sector put into question: that of cryptocurrencies.

Finally, Barça has decided to lean towards a more ethical and reliable option, TP Vision, a Dutch company founded in 2012 that is responsible for the design, manufacture and sales of Philips technology products. TP Vision, which becomes the club’s main sponsor along with Nike and Spotify, announced the sponsorship deal this morning and Barça ratified it shortly after it was signed in the Camp Nou box office. The next Assembly of Committed Members of Barça will have to ratify the operation.

The contract is for three seasons plus two optional ones, he said Sports world, and was able to confirm the ARA. In the 2023-2024 academic year, the Barcelona club will receive 8 million euros for this concept; in 2024-2025, 10 million; and in 2025-2026, 12 million. Laporta’s term ends in 2026 and, for this reason, from here on the contract foresees two more courses that the board of directors that leads the club, from then on, and the company will have to decide whether to execute or not If they choose to go ahead, in the 2026-2027 academic year Barça will enter 12 million and, in 2027-2028, 14 million.

But, curiously, on the sleeve of the shirt will not appear the brand TP Vision, but the name of an LED technology related to televisions that has been developed by this company: Ambilight TV. This will already appear in the League match between Barça and Mallorca this Sunday, both on the sleeve of the shirt and in various places at the Camp Nou. On the other hand, TP Vision will also provide the club with televisions and screens for the audiovisual structure of the new Camp Nou.

Reluctance to cryptocurrencies

Barça currently have a global sponsor, cryptocurrency exchange company WhiteBIT, which initially made a bid to appear on the shirt sleeve. But this proposal, financially generous, ran into the turning point of the negotiations that have lasted two years: the reluctance of a part of the board to make a brand appear on the shirt from a sector they consider “speculative, of risk, very variable and unethical”. In fact, one of the names that has not seen clearly this association with cryptocurrencies has been Laporta himself. For the same reason as WhiteBIT, Barça rejected the offer from Nexo, the largest lending entity in the digital finance sector. On the other hand, other actors responsible for the economic part of the entity saw with better eyes signing one of these offers.

There has been no shortage of examples of failed sponsorship partnerships between sports entities and cryptocurrency companies at Barça, which had previously ruled out partnering with cryptocurrencies for the front of the shirt, which Spotify has finally taken over. The bankruptcy of one of the world’s four major cryptocurrency exchanges, FTX, led to a global slump at the end of 2022 that ended up affecting the world of sports.

For example, Chelsea was left overnight without the sponsorship of WhaleFin, a platform of trading associated with FTX, which paid the London club more than 23 million euros per year for the shirt sleeve. On the other hand, Inter Milan, current Champions League finalist, had previously suffered non-payment by DigitalBits (a company blockchain open-source dedicated to cryptocurrencies) and because of that, he doesn’t wear any branding on the front of his shirt right now.

A lower deal than the English clubs

During these two years, Barça has waited for an offer from a solid company that would at least reach the minimum 15 million euros that Laporta’s board had proposed when he arrived at the club. But it hasn’t arrived and, given the need for money and the fact that the sleeve sponsorship was budgeted for the current financial year, which ends on June 30, the club has been forced to go ahead with the offer that there was on the table at the moment that best suited his wishes.

In this way, Barça will be able to financially exploit an asset that its two great rivals in the Spanish League, Real Madrid and Atlético de Madrid, have vacant. Instead, the numbers are clearly lower than the sleeve sponsorships of the two Manchester teams. United receive €23.6m a year from DXC Technology and City, the other Champions League finalist, €14.6m from Nexen Tire.