Spanish soccer giants Barcelona and Swedish audio streaming heavyweight Spotify have today announced an extended long-term sponsorship deal covering front-of-shirt branding and stadium naming rights.
Through the renewal, the company’s logo will continue to feature on both the men’s and women’s first team jerseys and the front of the training kits through 2030, while Spotify will retain naming rights to the LaLiga club’s iconic Camp Nou until 2034.
Spotify will pay around €65 million ($75.9 million) per year from 2026 for the front-of-shirt portion, and a further €10 million annually for the training kit.
Spotify initially partnered with Barcelona in a multi-faceted four-year deal at the start of the 2022-23 season, worth a total sum of around €280 million (then $320 million).
That agreement marked the first time the Catalan club’s home ground, which opened in 1957, had a naming rights sponsor, becoming Spotify Camp Nou.
The stadium is currently undergoing a renovation, but the club has now been granted a licence by the local council to partially reopen the venue and stage matches at a reduced capacity for the remainder of the season.
The revamp of Camp Nou forms part of Barcelona’s wider €1.5-billion Espai Barça project, which also includes the delivery of a new Palau Blaugrana arena and the Campus Barça development.
Barcelona have been playing their home games at the city’s Olympic Stadium since the 2023-24 season and have temporarily been using the ground so far this year despite attempts to reopen Camp Nou since August.
The team initially struck a one-season deal with the Barcelona City Council but was forced to extend that as work to complete the stadium continued. The Estadi Olímpic Lluíz Companys has a capacity of 60,713.
Camp Nou is already the largest stadium in Europe, and its capacity will increase to 105,000 once refurbishments are completed, making it the third-largest stadium in the world behind North Korea’s Rungrado 1st of May Stadium and India’s Narendra Modi Stadium.
Spotify replaced Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce brand, as the front-of-shirt sponsor for Barcelona’s men’s team, and home tools brand Stanley Black & Decker on the front of the women’s kits.
The lucrative tie-up represented the major audio streaming platform’s first sports sponsorship deal.
Spotify’s initial deal came at a critical time for Barcelona, as it helped to ease the club’s perilous financial situation, in which they racked up debts of almost €1.5 billion.
The club leveraged its commercial pull to emerge from that hole and recently announced that it reduced losses to €17 million for the 2024-25 season. Revenue for the year stood at €994 million, up from the €894 million in 2023-24.
This was powered by record commercial revenue of €259 million, comprised of existing partnerships and new sponsorship agreements inked over the period, including the club’s improved multi-year kit deal with long-term supplier Nike.
Barcelona won the LaLiga title last season, as well as the domestic Copa del Rey cup competition and the Spanish Super Cup.
Looking forward, with the club’s imminent return to the upgraded Camp Nou, it is predicting revenue of €1.075 billion across the current campaign, and to increase stadium income by €50 million, and equally a target of record merchandising revenues of close to €200 million.
Barca also recently penned a lucrative sponsorship deal with the tourism body of the Democratic Republic of Congo worth more than €40 million.
The Catalan side’s commercial portfolio additionally includes a sleeve sponsorship agreement with Ambilight TV.
Barcelona are currently second in LaLiga after eight games, two points behind rivals Real Madrid, and will face Girona in their next match tomorrow.
