Barcelona land Rakuten as main sponsor in S$84m deal

BARCELONA — Japanese online retailer Rakuten will be Barcelona’s main sponsor for the next four years in a deal worth at least €55 million (S$83.5 million) a year, the Spanish football giants said yesterday.

Rakuten, which specialises in e-commerce, communications, digital content and financial technology services, will replace Qatar Airways, Barcelona’s shirt sponsor since 2013, who were reported to have paid €35 million for the final year of their deal taking them up to the end of the 2016-17 season.

Barcelona say the new sponsor’s brand will appear on the front of the team’s jersey beginning in the 2017-18 season.

“I have the pleasure and honour to announce that the board of directors has approved that Rakuten be the new main and global sponsor of the club for the next four years,” Barcelona president Josep Maria Bartomeu told a news conference at the club’s Camp Nou stadium.

Barcelona’s success on the pitch make the Spanish Primera Liga side highly attractive to advertisers.

Despite Champions League disappointment last season, the team won both La Liga and the Copa Del Rey, Spain’s two domestic competitions.

The club also have some of the world’s most recognisable stars — vital marketing assets for the club’s partners — who have millions of followers on social media.

Barcelona’s Argentine striker Leo Messi is one of the most popular athletes in the world on social media, with more than 78 million fan followers on Facebook alone.

For Rakuten, Japan’s largest internet retailer by sales, the sponsorship is an opportunity to be associated with a team watched around the world by millions of fans. Hiroshi Mikitani, Rakuten’s founder, chairman and chief executive, said: “I have personally followed the team for decades and have long admired their unique playing style and professionalism.”

According to sports consultancy Repucom, corporate spending on football shirt sponsorship in Europe’s top six divisions has doubled since 2010, reaching €830 million this year.

The group says 80 per cent of clubs in the English Premier League have foreign shirt sponsors, with the global interest in football convincing overseas companies to use shirts as billboards even if they have few if any operations in the United Kingdom.

Shirt sponsorship is still relatively new territory for Barcelona.

For more than a century, the club refused to have a sponsor. When they finally relented in 2006, it was to apply the name of Unicef and the club reportedly paid the global children’s charity £1 million then to do so.

Barcelona have also signed deals to feature the Turkish electronics brand Beko on shirtsleeves and US semiconductor company Intel on the inside of its shirts.

According to Deloitte, Barcelona are the second-richest club in the world, earning revenues of €560.8 million in the 2014-15 season, behind Real Madrid. But the two Spanish clubs are expected to fall behind United, who are forecast to earn £500 million this season on the back of large increases in broadcasting revenues.

The announcement of the new sponsorship deal comes as the club is set to begin work in 2018 on an extensive renovation of their Camp Nou home that will see the capacity of Europe’s biggest stadium extended to 105,000 and an open facade to allow views across the city.

A budget of €420 million has been estimated for the project that will be financed in large part by proceeds from sponsorship. AGENCIES