FC Barcelona

• If you want to capture the next generation of fans, you need superb digital content.

• Dídac Lee used to sit on the FC Barcelona board of directors and he led the club’s digital strategy. Lee says that clubs need to look outside the football industry for inspiration.

• As part of the strategy, the club launched the Culers membership programme.

• Barça’s content is far more than just “short-form” clips aimed at Generation Z. A local filmmaker will produce the La Masia series, which focuses on a young player coming through the ranks of the famed youth academy.
  
  

From Johan Cruyff to Lionel Messi, FC Barcelona have always been at the forefront of the very best the global game has had to offer, and nowadays the club also excels in the virtual arena where it is forging a global fanbase. 

The Spanish club has long understood that its competitors are no longer solely on the pitch. To stay ahead of the global tech brands, FC Barcelona, an evergreen in pioneering and innovation, developed a digital strategy that entices fans, differentiates the club and conveys its values.

FC Barcelona have more than 400 million followers on social media platforms (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok), people who, one way or the other, identify themselves with the club. Barça know that today’s currency is fan attention, even more so among “Gen Z”, the next set of football fans. 

Fan attention generates revenue. On a global scale, the Blaugrana’s revenue is unsurpassed, yet there are limits to TV rights, merchandising and ticketing. According to Dídac Lee, a former FC Barcelona board member and driving force behind the club’s digital strategy, “It is not realistic to think that we are going to triple the income from the TV rights.”

A strong digital strategy complements the income from those traditional revenues, currently around EUR 100 million, but any aim to triple this figure may, given the pandemic, be too ambitious.

At the heart of the strategy is Barça Studios, which “centralises the creation, production and commercialisation of FC Barcelona's audiovisual output, and includes the management of club television channel Barça TV.” Barça Studios feeds content to Barça TV, which is available round-the-clock, with match highlights, first team squad member interviews and archive footage such as the longest sit-down chat with the legendary Cruyff ever recorded.

The vision, as Lee explains, is simple: “FC Barcelona is not just a football club, but an entertainment and content company as well.” Barça Studios, inspired in part by Disney, one of the world’s most recognisable entertainment brands, allows Barcelona to tell its own story and diversify assets.

When devising a new and wide-reaching digital strategy for FC Barcelona, Dídac Lee did not look to traditional arch-rivals Real Madrid as a benchmark. Nor did the Barcelona board member compare his club to other established international football brands, like Manchester United, or those pursuing global recognition, like Paris Saint-Germain.

Instead, Lee, the former head of Barcelona’s digital area, measured the Catalan giants against one of the world’s biggest entertainment companies.

"For me, the benchmark has been Disney because there are a lot of parallels between Disney and Barça," Lee has explained in an interview.

"Disney have their own parks, Barça has the Camp Nou stadium. They produce cartoons while Barcelona produces its content as well. They have merchandise, the club has a lot of merch. And they have Mickey Mouse, and Barça has its football stars,” he said with a smile.

As part of the strategy, the club launched the Culers membership programme.

For EUR 29.99 a year (the price in Spain), fans are offered the opportunity to “feel closer to Barça”, with benefits including discounts on tickets and merchandise. It is separate to becoming a socio, or club member, which typically takes three years of temporary membership for those without close family members who are existing members.

Another benefit of the Culers membership is unlimited access to Barça TV+, the club’s new subscription-based over-the-top (OTT) streaming service. Described by Lee as the “jewel in the crown” of the digital strategy, Barça TV+ includes on-demand highlights of first-team matches, exclusive player interviews, live coverage of FC Barcelona’s women’s team’s matches and documentary series.

Catalan director and independent filmmaker Albert Serra will produce the La Masia series, which focuses on a young player coming through the ranks of the famed youth academy, his journey and the human drama stories around him. The series will dovetail with FC Barcelona’s values: teamwork, respect, humility, hard work and competition. FC Barcelona’s digital strategy is therefore about exposure, fan loyalty, monetisation, innovation and transforming the club into a strong media brand beyond the realms of sports. 

It is also about values and identity, but in recent history no discussion about FC Barcelona was complete without accounting for the influence of Lionel Messi, the club’s mercurial lodestar over so many years. The Argentinean generated global attention like no other player throughout the past two decades, giving FC Barcelona a brand recognition of enormous magnitude.

While Lee is a huge admirer of the Blaugrana’s former number 10, he also thinks that the club’s digital, fan-centric model will continue to thrive even in the post-Messi era. The numbers back his claim. Even in seasons when the club did not excel, no one matched FC Barcelona’s online popularity. And that’s the way they want to keep it in Catalonia.