FC Barcelona ready to change stadium name for new sponsor and venture into cryptocurrency

Barcelona financial woes continue to dominate Spanish sports coverage. There is no way they can compete with the English top flight and French PSG. However, the situation in Spanish football can be improved by some super-rich and super-generous sponsors.

For example, Real Madrid have signed a 25-year deal with Legends Corporation from the United States, which organizes sports events. Under this agreement, the club’s budget will be supplemented by around €400 million annually by hosting various events at the new Santiago Bernabéu Stadium.

“Barça have taken a different approach to raising extra money by opting to renegotiate sponsorship deals. The Catalan team are close to signing agreements with Spotify and Polkadot, ready to replace Rakuten and Beko, who along with the bluegranate are already legends themselves.

What’s Polkadot

You’ve probably heard of Spotify (a platform for listening to music, audiobooks and podcasts without downloading them to your gadget). Polkadot, on the other hand, is known only to those whose business involves blockchain and financial transactions.

Polkadot is a system that connects different blockchains and enables them to interact with each other seamlessly. Actually, it’s about decentralised currency, which just recently made the upgrade of the Shell parachain (an independent blockchain) to Statemint status.

“Barça are not the first team in La Liga to start collaborating with a cryptocurrency sponsor. Consider Valencia, who have even gone as far as creating fan tokens by giving them their acronym VCF. Indeed, the club has entered into an agreement with the Socios side platform in a bid to increase its market price.

Amounts of the agreements

The contracts with Polkadot and Spotify are signed for five years. During that time, the Catalan club’s projected revenues from these contracts will be €340 million and €100 million respectively. If you add in the loan from Goldman Sachs bank, Barcelona can get rid of some debt, invest in their grandiose infrastructure projects and buy a top footballer.

Spotify will, of course, not only be the club’s title sponsor, whose logo will appear on men’s and women’s team shirts, their sports bases and all kinds of media products produced by the team’s studio (its owners, if necessary, could also be auctioned off by Barcelona).

Experts claim that the club will sell the music service the rights to the name of Barça’s home arena, which will be called Camp Nou Spotify. No information is currently available regarding the timing, cost and how fans will react to the historic renaming of the legendary stadium, but a decision seems to have been made.

What’s Spotify’s interest in Barcelona

It is likely that FC Barcelona, who are struggling to raise the finances to sign up every new player and have even reduced wages to be able to extend Camp Nou’s lease by six months, are more interested in the deal. However, all indications are that Spotify’s service is also seriously interested in working with the Catalan superclub.

Swedish billionaire Daniel Ek, owner of the music platform, attempted to buy Arsenal in 2021 but Texas businessman Stan Cronke refused to sell. One day that deal will have to happen anyway, but in the meantime, the owner of Spotify wants to build a successful partnership with Barça, which is in deep crisis.