FC Barcelona will take to the field this Sunday for El Clásico, a match that could go a long way to deciding whether they or arch-rivals Real Madrid end the season as La Liga champions.
But Sunday’s crunch game was meant to carry even greater significance. Barcelona’s executives had earmarked the fixture for a grand homecoming to the famed Camp Nou stadium, after almost two years of renovations.
They hope the €1.5bn rebuild will boost match day revenues, mainly through a substantial investment in new VIP seating, and ultimately help to alleviate the financial pressure on Barcelona.
However, the vast infrastructure project has been beset by delays, forcing the heavily indebted Catalan club to host the match six kilometres down the road at the city’s Olympic Stadium, its temporary home.
Playing at the Olympic Stadium, which has about 40,000 fewer seats than the Camp Nou, is costing Barcelona about €100mn a year in lost revenue, compounding its long-running financial troubles.
With music acts already booked to play the Olympic Stadium later in the year, and interest payments related to the Camp Nou construction work due to begin next summer, the builders are in a race against time to finish the job.
Despite being one of the biggest clubs in world football, Barcelona’s finances have been severely strained since the club used the proceeds from the record-breaking €222mn sale of Brazilian star Neymar, in 2017, to embark on an ill-judged player-buying spree.
In the years since, the club has been punished for repeatedly breaching Spanish football’s spending limit, which gives each team a budget linked to its revenue. Barcelona has been forced to offload star players, including Lionel Messi, and unless the club can generate fresh funds in the coming months, it will be unable to sign new players this summer.
Barcelona’s executives hope the addition of thousands of VIP seats at the Camp Nou will help them increase the club’s annual revenue by a third to €1.2bn within five years.
Manel Del Rio, Barcelona’s corporate director, oversees the club’s financial and commercial operations. He said upgrading the Camp Nou — now known as Spotify Camp Nou, owing to a sponsorship deal with the music streaming company — was “essential” to keep up with European rivals.
“The whole experience of coming to see a match at the Spotify Camp Nou is going to be day and night compared with what we had before,” he said. “The stadium is a huge part of our DNA. It’s hard to evaluate how much it is going to add to the brand [but] I think it has to be a huge percentage.”
Despite cutting its player wage bill by 25 per cent last season, Barcelona still reported an annual net loss of €91mn. The club slipped from fourth to sixth in Deloitte’s latest ranking of football clubs by revenue.
Financial debt, including stadium-related borrowing, stood at just under €1.3bn as of June 2024, according to figures from Football Benchmark. With €583mn of its stadium borrowings falling due in 2028, Barcelona has asked its advisers at Goldman Sachs to explore ways of lowering the interest costs on the debt.
To ease the near-term financial pressure, Barcelona has struck deals that swap long-term income for upfront cash. In 2022, it sold a quarter of its TV income over the next 25 years to US investment group Sixth Street, raising more than €500mn.
Meanwhile, controversy has erupted over Barcelona’s initial efforts to monetise its revamped stadium.
In January, the club said it had sold 30-year rights to unfinished VIP boxes at Camp Nou for €100mn. Yet the Spanish league said last month that the transaction had failed to appear in Barcelona’s accounts and cut the team’s budget with immediate effect, reigniting a legal battle over whether the club had enough headroom in the budget to register all of its players.
Barcelona wrote to La Liga to express its “surprise and indignation” at its decision to air the dispute publicly. However, this would not be the first time a putative asset sale has caused problems. Last year, Barcelona booked a €141mn writedown after it did not receive payments due from the sale of a stake in its digital engagement platform.
Victor Font, a local technology entrepreneur who ran against current club president Joan Laporta in 2021, and plans to do so again, said executives have been rushing to raise funds with little concern for the long-term implications.
“Instead of covering these financial holes with strategic partners that could generate win-win situations, they have been covered by unknown investors that cannot even fulfil their commitments. That has generated all this mess that the club is in right now,” he said.
Despite the turmoil off the pitch, Barcelona has been enjoying a good season on it. The team sits top of La Liga, has already won the Copa del Rey, and was this week just seconds away from its first Champions League final since 2015, until a late equaliser ultimately led to the team’s defeat by Inter Milan.
Del Rio said Barcelona’s strong performances this season — built on young local talents such as 17-year-old Lamine Yamal and Gavi — had boosted ticket sales and partly offset the shortfall from a temporary move to the Olympic Stadium.
The renovation will take capacity inside Camp Nou to about 105,000, making it the biggest football venue in Europe, and increase the number of VIP seats almost fivefold, to 9,600.
Barcelona says roughly 60 per cent of the VIP seats — which will cost up to €81,000 a season, up from about €12,000 previously — have already been sold. The club expects match day revenues to rise by around 60 per cent to at least €350mn per year.
“The market has told us there is demand,” said Del Rio. “As long as we get back here and have full availability of every asset, I think the club is going to do just fine.”
However, construction delays mean Barcelona will not be back home until late summer at the earliest. Even that target would mean playing football at a building site — the stadium’s new third tier, which will sit on top of two rings of VIP seats, is not due to be finished until early next year.
Font warns that the cost of servicing construction-related debt risks swallowing up most of the increased revenue, at least in the short term.
“Sometimes the club will tell you that the new stadium will be the Holy Grail in order for us to recover financially,” he said. “That’s a half truth.”
