FC Barcelona confirms stadium name change to Spotify Camp Nou

FC Barcelona will from next season play in the Spotify Camp Nou stadium, as the club and music streaming platform announced a “strategic long-term partnership.” Spotify will also appear as the main shirt sponsor for both the men’s and the women’s football teams for the next four years starting in the 2022/23 campaign.

The club has not revealed the financial impact that the new sponsorship deal will bring, but various media outlets report the agreement to be worth around €65-70 million to Barça annually; up to €280 million across the four years. The agreement, already approved and signed by club directors, is subject to ratification at the Extraordinary Delegate Members Assembly on April 3.

As part of the deal, Barça’s stadium will be given a corporate name for the very first time ever, with the name of the Swedish company providing a prefix to the traditional Camp Nou.

Negative spending limit

The Spotify sponsorship was announced just one day after La Liga revealed spending limits for clubs, which left FC Barcelona in a dire position. The league’s caps are designed to ensure financial health by preventing clubs from spending beyond their means, based on calculations of income and expenditure. La Liga cut the limits of the Catalan club for next year to minus €144 million. Essentially, this means the club must save €144 million, and until they do, they can only spend 25% of any savings that they can demonstrate they make.

The negative spending cap will not affect contracts already signed, and La Liga offer a certain amount of space to manoeuvre in the tight circumstances. For this reason, they engage in dialogue with all clubs and want to see that they are able to progressively cut costs and make savings, allowing a quarter of those savings to be spent on things like new signings and contracts.

Before the beginning of the 2021/22 campaign, the spending limit was set at a positive €97 million, but the January transfer window has seen that brought significantly down. In the winter, Ferran Torres arrived from Manchester City for reportedly an initial €55 million, while other deals also saw Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Adama Traore brought in to bolster the attack. Dani Alves, despite signing months earlier, was registered in January, as that was the earliest possible opportunity to do so.

Last August, Barça revealed their updated debt figures, showing losses of €91 million and total debts soaring to €1.35 billion.

CVC and Barça Studios

Barcelona are exploring alternative revenue sources to cope with the suffocating financial pressures the club is under. They are reportedly deep in negotiations with private equity company CVC Capital Partners about sealing a deal over future broadcasting revenues. Last summer, the investment firm reached a multi-billion euro deal with La Liga over broadcast rights. Then, Barcelona, Real Madrid, and Athletic Bilbao rejected the terms of the league-wide deal, which lasts for 50 years and gives CVC around 9% of the audiovisual rights for that time period, as any club could choose to opt out. Now, Barça are closing in on their own separate deal with the firm.

Reportedly, the Barça-CVC deal would last just 25 years and give the investment company around 10% of the broadcasting rights for this period. It’s said by some Catalan media outlets that this would add a much-needed €300 million to the coffers at the club. The club would be allowed to use some €75 of this for new signings, with the majority of the money allocated to improving facilities and possibly financing the new Espai Barça stadium grounds.

Additionally, club president Joan Laporta is interested in selling a portion of Barça Studios, the in-house audiovisual content creation platform. The club are exploring options of letting 49% of the audiovisual production wing go for around another €300 million, which would also ease the eye-watering levels of debt exceeding one billion euro. Meanwhile, Laporta spoke at the Mobile World Congress in February about how the club is also exploring the possibility of launching their own cryptocurrency and NFT series as a manner of monetizing millions of fans around the globe.