Spotify to Turn into FC Barcelona’s Important Shirt Sponsor
The Spotify title and emblem will adorn the entrance of FC Barcelona’s males’s and ladies’s shirts for the 2022-2023 season, starting July 1. The four-season sponsorship deal additionally contains the naming rights to Barcelona’s famed Camp Nou stadium, briefly renaming it Spotify Camp Nou. The deal is topic to ratification by the Barcelona Members Meeting, set to happen in April. No official monetary figures have been introduced, however ESPN studies that sources had beforehand pegged the deal at €280 million ($307 million). The deal comes after Barcelona’s CEO left the membership, reportedly as a consequence of his unhappiness with the ultimate phrases of the Spotify deal. The membership’s La Liga rivals Actual Madrid reportedly earn 70 million euros per season from its principal shirt sponsor Emirates.
In an official assertion, Spotify’s “Chief Freemium Enterprise Officer” Alex Norström mentioned of their plans for Camp Nou:
Spotify co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek is a lifelong Arsenal Soccer Membership fan, and he has beforehand tried to contain himself within the highest echelons of world soccer. Final yr, he led a consortium that made a reported 1.8 billion pound bid to take over possession of the London membership. On the time of the bid, Ek was price $4.7 billion and Spotify was price $54 billion, in response to Forbes. The bid was rejected by Arsenal’s homeowners Kroenke Sports activities Enterprises.
FC Barcelona, based in 1899, didn’t have a principal shirt sponsor till 2006 when the membership got here to an settlement with UNICEF. (For distinction, Actual Madrid, based in 1902, received its first principal shirt sponsor in 1982.) The take care of UNICEF lasted till 2011 when Barcelona opted for a extra profitable take care of Qatar Sports activities Funding price 30 million per season. The offers grew solely extra worthwhile, culminating in a 55-million-euro-per-season take care of Rakuten that can expire on the finish of the 2021-2022 season. The Japanese e-commerce big reportedly selected to not lengthen its take care of Barcelona as a result of departure of celebrity Lionel Messi and likewise the membership’s large money owed, which had reached 1.35 billion euros by August 2021.
Spotify has not too long ago confronted a brand new spherical of criticism as a consequence of its unique internet hosting of The Joe Rogan Expertise. Docs, scientists, and public well being officers have decried the podcast for spreading misinformation about COVID-19 and vaccines. As well as, Neil Younger took his music off of Spotify, stating that the platform was “spreading faux details about vaccines—probably inflicting loss of life to those that imagine the disinformation being unfold by them.” Joni Mitchell adopted swimsuit, saying that she’s additionally pulling her music from Spotify “in solidarity with Neil Younger and the worldwide scientific and medical communities on this challenge.” It was later revealed that Spotify’s take care of Rogan is price $200 million—double the initially reported determine.
Learn “In Reward of Neil Younger’s Everlasting Battle With the Music Business” on the Pitch.