Almost midnight on Thursday in Barcelona. Some people start Friday, as they hurry up and fight the cold outside the Spotify Camp Nou, which is in the middle of renovations. They can be seen in the fog, along with a few cars that are also on the streets, and all of this can be watched from anywhere in the world through Barca One, the streaming platform that FC Barcelona launched hours earlier, in a new step towards the consolidation of its audiovisual content strategy.

Barca One is the evolution of Barca TV, the channel that the club opened in 1999 and that ceased its transmissions at the end of June 2023, after 24 years of installing an innovative concept and going through the different periods of television paradigm changes. Which were not few. Manchester United was the first soccer club to open its own channel in September 1998. It wasn’t long before Barcelona and Real Madrid, global soccer brands, also launched their signal. More than a quarter of a century later there is already a presumption that every soccer club should have its own audiovisual content platform.

Barcelona is one of the main tourist destinations on the planet and FC Barcelona is the third most visited place in the city. The phenomenon persists even after Lionel Messi’s idea. Some interesting data to understand what Barca represents in terms of popularity:

– 83,500 spectators was the average attendance until 2023 after the restrictions due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
– it is estimated that the club has almost 500 million fans worldwide.
– more than 1,200 “peñas” around the world concentrate Barca’s fan club activity.
– led in Messi-times in engagement with fans on social networks: 1.37 billion interactions on social media in the 2019-2020 season.

Barca One is now the global eye for the club fan wherever they are. But it is much more than that. Or it should be. The journey for soccer clubs to set up their own OTT has so far been a winding and slippery road. Around the end of the last decade, there was a boom of clubs that managed to have their own brand with the addition of “Play” to present themselves as the club’s channel.

Technology made it possible. Registration and memberships. Freemium content. Monetizing the relationship with the fan and the member. Technological evolution accelerated this process. The tricky issue is the same as always: what content to generate, at what cost and how to produce and manage it. That part was the most complicated: why would anyone pay to watch on the club’s OTT what was previously shown for free on social networks?

Barca One is sending out some signals to pay attention to this new stage with its streaming platform. At the helm is an experienced executive like Toni Cruz -with a background in Endemol- and at another level, Elena Neira, a researcher of new consumption platforms, has been appointed as a strategy consultant.

A fact: Barca One will allow up to two simultaneous reproductions of content and promises a less intrusive display of ads than the average. FC Barcelona provides 1,500 hours of video that is part of the club’s historical archive, but will also have daily programming with all the club’s news through live programs, press conferences and original productions. Barca One comes free of charge for “culés” members and also offers a subscription of 1.99 euros per month in an ad-free version.

The management of its own content, a dashboard to know the behavior of the fans who access it and a destination to centralize all the information of a club that the fan seeks first hand, is almost a must for a global brand like Barcelona. The enormous challenge is to produce and present attractive content in times when platforms such as Netflix, Apple, Max, Prime Video and Disney have an unparalleled production and distribution capacity to organize the sports agenda on demand. In fact, FC Barcelona itself produced “MatchDay” for Netflix from Barca Studios.

What should a soccer club do with its streaming platform to compete, or in any case, organize its offer against rivals of such stature and that are dedicated to just that: entertainment? That is the big question.

FC Barcelona seems to have its roadmap. Already in the process of incubation and upcoming launch, the club has in Barca Games the heart of its own gamer ecosystem to capture the new generations that come to soccer from video games. To train gamers as it did with the young soccer players at La Masia.

Offering only what a soccer club can give. That heartbeat through audiovisual content. Watching from a night camera how the new Camp Nou is being built may not be enough to justify a whole streaming platform, but it is the exact moment in which a club “talks” with its fans. That is the seal of what is irreplaceable and emotionally unsurpassable.