🇪🇸 How Barcelona Registered Dani Olmo

This week my YouTube channel grew to 20,000 subscribers.

According to my trusted analytics 58% of the readers of this newsletter “came” from my YouTube channel so if you are here for the first time, welcome to all of the newcomers. In addition, thank you to anyone who has been here for some time. I enjoy bringing these articles to you every week.

Today, we will cover two sporting entities that completely fascinate me. FC Barcelona being one. DAZN being the other.

I swear, both of these companies are like soap operas in their own right! We start with our friends over in Catalunya.

I’m struggling to tell if Barcelona are complete idiots or a team packed with geniuses.

On the pitch there is some harmony. They are currently 3rd in La Liga and still in a strong-ish position in the Champions League. However, off the pitch they are still in dire financial straits.

As of January 1st they were unable to register new €55m signing Dani Olmo (and Pau Víctor) because they were in breach of the La Liga-imposed annual spending limit of €426 million.

They needed to raise funds to get into the green and they did so in a very unique way.

Joan Laporta revealed that Barcelona had raised €100m by selling a percentage of their corporate seats in the newly refurbished Camp Nou.

• €70m came from investors from the UAE

• €30m came from investors from Qatar

The Spanish media went onto report that the buyers bought the rights to the seats for the next 20 years allowing them to monetise them however they see fit.

Never in my life have I seen a club sell future revenues from corporate boxes in an attempt to generate cash flow today!

In November, one of the newsletter articles was appropriately titled “The Desperate Deals Keeping Barcelona Afloat”.

For those that were not subscribed in November I will paste the table I had in there listing the drastic deals Laporta has put together to generate cash for Barcelona.

When its written out in plain text it really does paint a picture.

Laporta is a deal-maker, you gotta give him that.

Finally, DAZN.

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) is reportedly close to acquiring a 10% stake in sports streaming giant DAZN for over $1 billion.

The deal, which could reportedly close by the end of January(!) would value DAZN at $10 billion.

Not sure if any of you are eagle-eyed like me but during the Usyk/Fury2 fight in December, Len Blavatnik was sitting front row next to Jason Statham, Rosie Huntingdon-Whitely and Turki Alalsheik.

Len is one of the richest men in the world and the owner of DAZN so naturally, that seat positioning makes sense. But shortly after that fight these reports spread through the wilderness and his presence there began to make even more sense.

This would be a pretty sizeable deal for both DAZN and for the Saudi regime. Presence in a sports broadcaster enables them to not rely so much on BeIN Sports and other local “providers” in the Middle East. It also gives them strategic positioning for content and sponsor partnerships ahead of the World Cup in 2034.

Two fascinating companies with alot of exposure to the Middle East this week. Fascinated to see how Barca steady the ship.

See you next week.