He Barça is studying the transfer of part of the first team’s basketball games to the Palau Sant Jordi. The Barça club has been negotiating this possibility with the Barcelona city council for months and this Tuesday it sent a survey to its members to assess this issue, among others linked to attendance at basketball games.
“In price conditions similar to the current ones, would you be willing to go to the Palau Sant Jordi (Montjuic) for some important games?” This is the key question of the survey, which then asks members about “why reason(s) would you not want to go to the Palau Sant Jordi?”
Barça won its first Euroleague in a Final Four contested at the Palau Sant Jordi in 2003
Pep Morata / MD
Barça’s plan to move some of its basketball games to the Palau Sant Jordi, a facility with capacity for 16,670 spectators at basketball games, responds to three objectives. First of all, demonstrate to the Euroleague that steps are being taken towards compliance with the regulations at the capacity level. Barça is the only one of the big clubs in the competition that regularly fails to comply with the Euroleague rule that indicates that its teams must play in halls with a minimum capacity of 10,000 spectators. Only because of the great entity and importance of the Barça club and its recurring promises to build a new Palau, the organization has been turning a blind eye in the last twenty years.
On the other hand, FC Barcelona intends with this step give way to the extensive waiting list of subscribers and create more potential interested parties in subscribing to the future new Palau. The third objective of the club is begin rehearsing the transition to a new Palau with 15,000 seatswhich is the capacity planned for the new large pavilion that the club has planned.
Another undeclared benefit of the punctual transfer to the Palau Sant Jordi is the increase in box office revenue. Currently, Barça can only put a small number of tickets on sale (they do not reach 3,000) since Palau subscribers have their seat reserved if they do not offer it through the ‘Seient Lliure’ (free seat). Another advantage of going to Sant Jordi is that Barça could respond to the high demand for tickets from some Euroleague teams (Olympiakos he asked for 3,000 on his last visit) and also control rival fans better. It must be remembered that this season the numerous fans of Zalgiri y Partisan who came to the Palau during the visits of their teams created notable problems – some of them security – as many of them were distributed throughout the facility.
This transfer of Barça basketball to the Palau Sant Jordi is also linked to the bid by the city of Barcelona for the 2025 Final Four. Barça aspires to a more beneficial economic agreement with the city council (which would rent the facility) in exchange for helping the city with its influence to get the Euroleague to charge it a lower fee for the Final Four. The city council, on the other hand, wants Barça to play all its games at Sant Jordi. All of this is on the table and is the result of negotiation at this time.
The emergence of Abu Dhabi in the bid for the 2025 Final Four (and the next two, with a dizzying offer of 25 million euros per edition when Berlin will pay 4 million for this year’s 2024), could ruin the goal of the city council to bring to the city the fourth Final Four of the Euroleague (or European League) in history after those of 1998, 2003 and 2011.
2024-02-28 14:04:26
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