Barcelona To Sell Nou Camp Naming Rights To Fight Against Coronavirus

Barcelona is set to sell the naming rights to the Nou Camp for one year in an effort to raise money for the fight against the coronavirus.

The Spanish club’s executive board said on Tuesday the club will donate the entire fee raised by selling the title rights to the Nou Camp to fighting the global pandemic.

The Nou Camp is the biggest stadium in Europe with more than 99,000 seats. It has never had a sponsor since opening in 1957.

The club had planned to wait to sell the stadium’s title rights for the first time in the 2023-24 season. At that time, the club hopes to bring in £264million paid up front for a 25-year contract to pay for renovations to the stadium and other facilities.

According to Associated Press , Barcelona could be taking a similar tack to when they gradually moved from no sponsorship on their shirt to multi-million-pound deals.

At first they put the children’s charity UNICEF on the shirt but many saw that as a soft launch for corporate branding.

Those predictions later proved correct as UNICEF was moved to the back and the advertising space on the front of the shirt was sold.

The initiative arose in an emergency situation. We think that we have to have a very quick response, putting our crown jewel at the service (of the fight).’

Cardoner, who has recovered after contracting the coronavirus, said the board conceived of this new charity sale independent of the long-term deal of 25 years.

But he said that if there emerges a sponsor who wanted to include it in the long-term deal then the club would consider it.

Cardoner said Barcelona want to listen to offers from companies and private foundations and will consider opening it up to a group of interested sponsors who could team up and hopefully provide even more funds to help battle the virus.

He would not give any estimate on how much the foundation hopes to earn from this ‘one-shot’ sale. But given the greatness of Lionel Messi and the millions of spectators who tune in each week to watch Barcelona’s games, the Nou Camp is one of the most coveted venues in sports.

Nou Camp is sending out an S.O.S.,’ Cardoner said. ‘We are open to everything. We want to maximise the economic participation and to ensure that the partners share our same social values.’

Barcelona said they want to propose using part of the money in Spain, especially in Catalonia, and in countries where the club has current charities. Cardoner said specific projects have not been chosen, but he would like some money to go to helping the elderly, especially in the devastated nursing home sector.

Cardoner said that he took some inspiration from the club’s decision in 2006 to put UNICEF on its shirt, which had never carried a sponsor before. The club moved the UNICEF logo to the back of the shirt in 2011 and sold the front to a corporate sponsor. They have continued to donate £1.76m to UNICEF annually.

The main impetus, however, hit Cardoner while he was confined to his bed waging his own fight against an infection from the virus. He never needed hospitalisation and fully recovered after a couple of weeks, but he said that the experience prompted him ‘think big.’

‘I spent a long time in bed and had time to think,’ he said. ‘We do a lot through our foundation, and it occurred to me that we had to think big, think big like we did with the shirt and UNICEF.