Barcelona and the giant sports brand Nike closed in early Saturday an agreement that revises and improves the current one, valid until 2018, and sets the conditions until 2026, by which Barcelona will become “the highest paid club in the world”, as recognized by Barca sources. By that agreement, the club announced in a statement in the afternoon, the signing of the Portland company will have them become the first commercial partner of the Catalan club, who will receive about 155 million euros per year, based on a fixed 100 million annually plus the variables in terms of sales and rights licensing fees and management of official club stores, which the entity will regain on full control after this agreement.
The agreement increases by 20% the remuneration to be received by the two seasons remaining to fulfill the contract, which reached 65 million last season thanks to the triple. Thus it reaches almost 100 in the next two seasons, and scaling up from 2018 to about 155 per year.
Barca will overcome the Adidas agreement with United, which until now was the highest-paid club at the rate of 103 million per year. “With this agreement we expand a strategic alliance for the club and strengthen our global reach,” said the company’s president Josep Maria Bartomeu.
The signing of the new agreement is a relief to Bartomeu and their managers, doomed to meet the requirements set by the financial control and the self-imposed goal to achieve a billion annual revenue starting in 2021. Without finding a sponsor for the merchandise, some managers began to be concerned by the gap in gross operating profit calculated before the deduction of financial expenses, called Ebitda, that is almost at one point the top place set by the board.
Which would force the board to endorse the budgets with their own estate. Failing to find a main sponsor for the entity, Nike will market during the summer campaign without advertising, since the agreement with Qatar ends in just over a month and Bartomeu broke the agreement reached by the former economic vice president of the entity, Javier Faus, before the company’s presidential elections last July.
