SPORT
Whatever your allegiances, you have to admit that no football club has a brand quite like FC Barcelona.
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he Spanish La Liga champion is internationally perceived as the club that plays beautiful football, the club that is owned by its fans, the club that fights for equality, the club that represents a city and an entire region, and the club whose values can be summed up in one word recognisable the world over – ‘Barça’. The Barça brand appeals to fans internationally, and two million people each year visit the club’s home to experience the museum, buy the merchandise and tour Camp Nou – the iconic stadium the club has called home since 1957. But despite this popularity, the club wants more. Operating in an ever more competitive battleground with the world’s most popular clubs – including rival Real Madrid, which is planning a stadium expansion and overseas theme parks – Barça’s board reached the conclusion it has no choice but to expand.
W E ’R E A SOCI A L CLUB A ND W E ’R E PA RT OF THIS CIT Y. IT DOESN ' T M A K E SENSE FOR US TO BUILD FENCES
Barça to create new value streams for the club
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Espai Barça – a new district for fans Espai Barça, or ‘Barça Space’, will be a pedestrianised, landscaped boulevard for all things Barça. The district will integrate with the city 24/7; a new neighbourhood of restaurants, cafés, sports facilities and the club’s museum, hotel and megastore. “This is an open space for everyone,” says Moix. “We want to liberate this space for the neighbourhood. Espai Barça won’t be like an amusement park where you have to pay to enter. We’re a social club and we’re part of this city. It doesn’t make sense for us to build fences.” The club hopes the result will be “every Barça fan’s dream” – a place they can call their own which will increase the club’s engagement with fans, its revenue and the value of its assets, boost sponsorship, improve conditions for its athletes, achieve environmental sustainability and generate activity 365 days a year. At the heart of the project are three major infrastructure changes. Camp Nou will be completely revamped at a cost of €360m – with a new roof installed and capacity increased from 90,000 to approximately 105,000. A further €90m will be spent on building a new Palau Blaugrana, a multi-purpose
CLAD mag 2016 ISSUE 2
PHOTOS AND IMAGES PROVIDED BY FC BARCELONA
Project commisioner Jordi Moix wants Espai
“We don’t have the luxury of ignoring other sources of revenue anymore,” says Jordi Moix, one of the club’s elected board members and the commissioner in charge of the club’s expansion dreams. “We’re an institution that wants to take advantage of its brand. If we want to remain independently owned and avoid raising season ticket prices and selling players, then we must create new value streams. “We did it years ago by opening our museum, but we have so much potential to do more. It would be a sin not to,” he said. While most football clubs dream of expansion, Barça has two precious commodities that make its ambitions feasible: ownership of 20 hectares of development-ready land in Les Corts, and a brand that can attract significant investment. Moix and the board have imagined something particularly ambitious: a whole new Barça district surrounding Camp Nou, described by club president Josep Maria Bartomeu as “the most important sports project in Europe and the world.”