Spanish football giant Barcelona has reportedly rejected a €300 million ($342.7 million) stadium naming rights offer form the country-based broadcast group Mediapro.
Jaume Roures, Founder and CEO of the Spanish media agency, has revealed that the LaLiga champions club has rejected their offer for the naming rights of the iconic Camp Nou stadium.
Roures, in an interview with Spanish radio station Cadena Cope, has claimed that the potential deal – for which the amount was to be paid over a 20-year period – had been discussed.
However, the talks between the two parties collapsed over a demand from Barcelona that Mediapro were to withdraw a lawsuit filed against the club’s former president Sandro Rosell.
The action, which had been made in 2016, related to a complaint of espionage against Rosell, who stood as Barcelona’s president between 2010 and 2014.
“We had negotiations with the club for a couple of months. There were a few meetings with this objective, but these broke down all of a sudden, and this requirement that was out of place appeared,” said Roures.
The five-time Champions League winners have been searching for a naming rights partner for the 99,354-seater venue for almost three years, with an agreement seen as a key part of the funding process for the club’s planned major redevelopment of the stadium.
Japanese e-commerce giant and the club’s principal sponsor Rakuten had also expressed interest for securing the naming rights for Camp Nou in June. Barcelona was, however, reluctant to sign a deal with an existing sponsor. The company already pays Barcelona €58 million ($67.9 million) a year for the shirt sponsorship deal that will run through 2020-21.
In July, Barcelona appointed American financial services company Goldman Sachs to advise them in their mission to redevelop the ground, with the revamp having a budgeted cost of €600 million. Plans for the ‘Espai Barca’ renovation project include the addition of a basketball arena, as well as an increase in capacity to 105,000.
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