Barcelona resell a part of Barça Studios to enable player registrations

Yesterday we heard that Barcelona was ready to pull the last economic lever at its disposal to create important revenue to help with the financial fair-play situation. Today we found out that the lever was a re-sale of Barça Studios to a German fund, creating €60 million worth of revenue which will be played imminently.

That €60 million will enable Barcelona to register every new signing and renewal, meaning they won’t have a Jules Kounde situation where a player was unable to be registered in time for the La Liga kickoff.

Barcelona have signed three new players so far, Inigo Martinez, Oriol Romeu and ilkay Gundogan, and there will be no issues registering them ahead of the new season.

They’ve also agreed to contract renewals with Gavi, Araujo, Sergi Roberto, Marcos Alonso, Iñaki Peña and Alejandro Balde, and all six will be registered in time.

€60 million will come from the re-sale of Barça Studios

The German fun is buying 16% of Barça Studios, 8% from Orpheus Media and 8% from Socios.com. Both companies held 24.5% before the deal, meaning when everything is completed and payments have been made, the outside ownership of Barça Studios will look like this:

Orpheus Media – 16.5%
Socios.com – 16.5%
German fund – 16%

Barca Studios are world-renowned for its digital activation and production, using Barça Studios to uncover new and exciting digital content streams, including things like NFTs.

When they sold the 24.5% stake to Socios, it was confirmed that the blockchain specialist would develop Barca Studios’ digital portfolio and leverage Chillz Chain 2.0, which is so far over my head I can’t even begin to describe what that means.

The important part here is that Barcelona won’t have any issues registering their new players. It also means that Barcelona still maintain 51% of the studio, so a controlling majority. They won’t want to sell any more, and hopefully we can get the financial situation under control.