Espanyol’s journey to Stage Front Stadium

BarcelonaCornellà-El Prat, Power8 Stadium, RCDE Stadium and, from the 2023-24 academic year, Stage Front Stadium. Espanyol’s stadium will receive a fourth name in just 14 years of life, the second commercial after the fleeting Power8 stage. The agreement that will be presented this Monday with Stage Front, an American technology company specializing in the sale of event tickets, will be the highest for a Segona club. And if he goes up to Primera it will be the third contract of naming rights most important in the League, only surpassed by that of Spotify with Barça and that of Cívitas with Atlético de Madrid (8.4 million annually).

As long as he plays in the silver category, Espanyol will receive a little more than one million euros a year, a figure that would increase if he returned to the elite. According to ARA, Primera Stage Front would pay a fixed fee of less than two million, a figure that could exceed them if some variables were met. The white-and-blue club could receive more than ten million euros during the five years contemplated in the agreement. The contract leaves the door open for it to be extended beyond 2028 if both sides agree. This is a vital economic boost for the entity, which will face its sixth relegation without the economic parachute it had in the 2020-21 academic year.

Espanyol’s path to getting a commercial name for its pitch dates back almost two decades. In 2005 the white-and-blue club was looking for a source of income to help finance its new stadium. The first step in finding a brand interested in the commercial name of the field was to hire an American consultant. The search then did not bear fruit because it ran into three major impediments: the club’s lack of media renown on an international scale; that the culture of naming rights was not extended to the League, and, no less important, that a project was sold on a plan that did not see the light of day until 2009. It also did not help that several Spanish companies were technically vetoed by some members of the board of directors of the ‘epoka, who had commercial interests with competing companies.

The Power8 Scam

Research intensified in 2011, when Cornellà-El Prat was already a reality. Another consultancy analyzed what return it could have for a company to sponsor the name of the stadium. The payoff came in 2014 when the deal was closed with Power8, a Chinese technology company linked to sports betting that sponsored other clubs, including Fulham and Everton. Between fixed and variable, that agreement – ​​which included the shirt and other assets – could reach 5.5 million euros. Of the almost 40 million he could have collected, however, he only collected about eight, because the deal fell through in late 2015 when it was discovered that Power8 was part of a pyramid scheme. Those resources were a great help for a Spaniard drowned by a debt that ended up facilitating the sale to Rastar.

Since 2016, already with Chen Yansheng at the organization, Espanyol has surveyed several companies from around the world to put a commercial name on the stadium again. One of the first was the Mexican state of Quintana Roo, who in 2017 linked up with the club again, but only to appear on the front of the shirt. The entity’s high financial claims, which at times asked for between 2.5 and 4 million, thwarted the interest of some Asian and North American companies. The ones that came closest were a technology company and another automotive company that was proposed to make a showroom in the stadium, with a circuit included. Now Espanyol embraces Stage Front, which has found its gateway to Europe in Cornellà-El Prat.