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FC Barcelona sits atop the La Liga rankings. And Spotify sits atop FC Barcelona—or at least on the team’s jerseys and facilities.
For the past three seasons, the audio company has been the Spanish soccer club’s main partner as part of a long-term deal that includes a front-of-kit sponsorship and stadium naming rights, among other assets.
But it’s not always the Spotify brand that appears on the Barça jerseys.
When the partnership debuted, Alex Norström, the company’s co-president and chief business officer, hinted in a statement at the time that Spotify was considering using the jersey real estate to highlight various artists and their brands. Since then, Spotify has swapped its own branding out on the jerseys for logos associated with major artists, like Drake’s company October’s Very Own and Travis Scott’s Cactus Jack brand.
Though Spotify occasionally removes itself from the Barça kits, Head of Marketing Marc Hazan said the sponsorship has proven invaluable for driving buzz for the brand.
“If I wanted to create cultural noise like we do with some of these things that we do, like Travis Scott, could you even do that without this [jersey asset]? I don’t think you could,” Hazan told Marketing Brew at Cannes Lions. “If you were trying to do that yourself, it would be very difficult and probably very expensive…So to us, it’s an unbelievable, unique platform for artists to showcase their work that can’t really be done anywhere else.”
Back to the start: When the possibility of working with Barça crossed Hazan’s desk, Spotify wasn’t in the market for a sports sponsorship, he said. But the opportunity involved the team’s full suite of rights—including placement on both the men’s and women’s jerseys, as well as the training center and stadium naming rights—so Spotify went all in, according to Hazan.
“Spotify has never undertaken a partnership at this scale before,” Norström said in the announcement post.
While the tie-up was perhaps unexpected, the Spotify team was nevertheless convinced that it would result in worthwhile activations like the artist jersey partnerships, Hazan told us. Spotify kicked off the initiative with Drake in 2022 to celebrate him becoming the first artist to reach 50 billion streams on the platform, and has since partnered with artists including ROSALÍA, The Rolling Stones, Karol G, and Coldplay.
Sworn enemies? One of the KPIs Hazan said he considers for the sponsorship is relative media value, and with a rabid, global fandom, Barça delivers in spades on that front, he said. Buzz is also especially important when it comes to the jersey takeovers. When Spotify put a limited number of the Travis Scott Barça jerseys up for sale—1899, to be exact, in honor of the year the team was founded—they sold out quickly, he said. Beyond that, he said, streams of Travis Scott songs increased by 40% following the Barça activation.
“The [number of] impressions that we get for these takeovers has just gone up and up and up and up and over time, and that’s now started to translate to on-platform activity,” Hazan said.
The activations even seem to supersede La Liga team rivalries; when Karol G performed at Santiago Bernabéu Stadium, where Real Madrid plays, shortly after her Barça takeover, Hazan said he didn’t think anyone was put out (although when it comes to fandom, one can never be too sure there are no hard feelings).
In the stands: Hazan didn’t indicate any immediate intentions to stretch into other leagues, but he said he’s eager to work more closely with the athletes on FC Barcelona Femení and to tap into the iconic Spotify Camp Nou stadium, which is expected to reopen in September after renovations are complete.
“Each one of these takeovers has grown and grown and grown in terms of scope and opportunity,” Hazan said. “We will continue to push ourselves…because we believe there’s so much more to go.”
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