Barcelona’s members signed off the 2025/26 accounts, with ordinary revenue over €1.06 billion for the first time in the club’s history.

In the same accounts was a €23 million impairment against Barça Produccions, the club’s parent company for its digital and audiovisual business. Produccions now holds what used to be Barça Vision, the club’s Web3 and metaverse business, which covers utility NFTs, blockchain partnerships, metaverse, VR and AR projects, and virtual worlds like Roblox.

Discussed in this edition of Sporting Crypto:

1) Barcelona’s 2025/26 accounts 📉

2) Socios’ €100m investment 🪙

3) The buyout, the SPAC and the write-downs 📉

4) To conclude 🧠

📚 My friend and advisor John Kosner, ESPN’s former senior digital media executive, has written a book with Ed Desser, the NBA’s senior media executive for 23 years.

We’re Live! Inside the BIG Business of Sports Media explains how the sports media business works, from what’s inside a 100-page media rights agreement to how to value rights.

It hit #1 in Sports Broadcasting on Amazon in its first week. You can order it here.

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On paper, FC Barcelona’s most recent accounts look solid.

Ordinary revenue reached €1.06 billion, up €66 million on the prior year, and the club said that was the first time it had crossed the billion-euro mark.

Ordinary profit was €0.2 million, and after extraordinary items and tax the net result was a loss of €18 million, with EBITDA positive at €140 million.

But as a friend of Sporting Crypto Michael Broughton spotted on SportBiz, the same accounts booked a €23 million impairment against Barça Produccions. Off The Pitch put the charge at €23.2 million and the net loss at €17.8 million, and noted a €53 million write-down on the same business the year before, in 2024/25.

As we previously covered on Sporting Crypto, the club has used five different names for this business since 2022, so here’s who’s who.

Barça Studios was valued at €400 million in summer 2022, and in August 2023 Barcelona tried to list the wider media business on Nasdaq at around $1 billion in the heady SPAC era of finance. By the 2025/26 accounts, per SportBiz, the club’s stake has risen to 63.14%, and that controlling stake is carried at roughly €73 million.

In short, Barcelona segregated their media and digital rights into Barça Studios and Barça Vision, two entities. They then wanted to SPAC a rollup of the two entities, after raising at a €400m valuation on Barça Studios alone, at $1bn on Nasdaq. That never happened, and now the equity and debt is being swallowed up by Barça Produccions, which is controlled by FC Barcelona.

On 1 August 2022, FC Barcelona announced the sale of 24.5% of Barça Studios to Socios.com for €100 million, “to accelerate the club’s audiovisual, blockchain, NFT and Web.3 strategy.”

BeInCrypto quoted Joan Laporta, Barça’s president, at the time saying the Barça Studios portfolio included the metaverse, NFTs and Barça tokens, and that “it’s the sale of a stake … it’s in principle forever, we could recover it if something happens.”

So €100 million for 24.5% put a €400 million valuation on Barça Studios. The cash was one of Laporta’s “economic levers”, and Barcelona needed it so La Liga would let them register Lewandowski, Raphinha, Koundé and the rest of that summer’s signings.

That same summer, Barcelona also sold a further 15% of their La Liga TV rights to Sixth Street, per Reuters, taking Sixth Street to 25% for 25 years. SportBiz puts the total for that 25% at €667 million.

As we previously covered on Sporting Crypto, my reaction at the time was that Socios had “struck a deal to basically acquire ~25% of FC Barcelona’s Web3 rights forever. Which is crazy, really.” I asked why you would sell them forever and not for a set period of time, like pretty much all other rights.

But, Barcelona were desperate, and they got a valuation that felt huge at the time, and still does now. They got some cash up front, but not the whole amount. But enough that they could say on accounts money was ‘arriving’. For Socios, they bought credibility.

Four more parties come into the story after Socios.

On 12 August 2022, Barcelona sold another 24.5% of Barça Studios to Orpheus Media for another €100 million. So Socios and Orpheus held 49% between them at the same €400 million valuation, and Barcelona kept control. This was a match made in heaven if the SPAC at $1bn was a reality.

But only some of the money arrived. Socios and Orpheus had paid €10 million each by the end of 2022, per Crónica Global.

On 11 August 2023, FC Barcelona made two announcements.

First, LIBERO and the NIPA-advised investors bought 29.5% of Barça Vision (Bridgeburg) for €120 million, “corresponding to part of the participation being held by Socios.com and Orpheus Media.”

In other words, the €120 million bought Socios and Orpheus out in part. As we previously covered on Sporting Crypto, half of it (€60 million) went on that buyout, and the deal put Barça Vision at close to $450 million. I called $132 million for 29.5% of Barcelona’s Web3 rights in perpetuity “ridiculously expensive” at the time.

It landed on the Friday before Barcelona’s La Liga opener against Getafe, and helped get that summer’s signings registered in time for the weekend. Another economic lever used by Barcelona to ensure compliance with financial regulations.

The second announcement was a Business Combination Agreement with Mountain, which would merge Barça Vision and the audiovisual business into Barça Media and list it on Nasdaq. Closing was aimed at the last quarter of 2023, subject to Mountain shareholder approval, a members’ assembly vote and other conditions.

(stay with me, people)

The deal valued Barça Media at a pro-forma enterprise value of approximately $1 billion (about €910 million). (Enterprise value is what the whole business is worth to a buyer, its shares plus its debt minus its cash, and pro-forma means as if the deal had already gone through.) The SEC deck put it at around $973 million across redemption scenarios, with Barcelona keeping majority control of the listed company.

That deck also states the entity needed at least €50 million of cash across the new company, Mountain and subsidiaries. And it showed Barça Produccions was still owed €180 million in cash by Socios (through its subsidiary Blaugrana Invest) and Orpheus, with each side still obligated to pay €30 million in June 2024 and again in June 2025.

Barcelona closed 2023/24 with a €91 million loss, mainly due to a €141 million extraordinary charge tied to investors not paying on the digital arm, per 2Playbook.

On 28 June 2024, Mountain and FC Barcelona jointly announced the deal was terminated. Per SportBiz, the minimum cash condition had been renegotiated down to $40 million along the way, and there was a revenue condition the parties couldn’t meet.

In August 2024, Crónica Global reported that the club had only received €65 million of the €200 million agreed in 2022, with later instalments missed or restructured through new investors. That leaves €135 million unpaid, which goes a long way to explaining the €141 million charge.

In February 2025, the club started merging Bridgeburg into Barça Produccions. At that point Socios, through Blaugrana Invest, held 18.96% of Bridgeburg and Orpheus held 1.83%, after the respective buyouts.

Barcelona wrote the business down by €53 million in 2024/25, per Off The Pitch, and by another €23 million in 2025/26. The club’s stake got to 63.14%, “largely because it cancelled debt owed by a partner who hadn’t paid,” and that 63.14% is carried at roughly €73 million in the club’s books. That values the whole business at just under €116 million, compared to the €400 million valuation Socios and Orpheus bought into in August 2022.

So on paper, Barcelona were consistently able to raise fresh capital, rotating the hands of various companies that saw upside in these assets. But now, those assets are one asset, still privately held, and depreciating fast.

The short-term gain in accounting terms is now biting them. They booked value on cash that never arrived, and now they’re writing it down, even though they have posted record revenues and a small ordinary profit.

The crypto part of this is that Socios paid €100 million for 24.5% of Barça Studios in August 2022, and part of that stake (and Orpheus’) went to LIBERO and NIPA in the €120 million deal in August 2023. The SPAC was terminated in June 2024, and the 2025/26 accounts put another €23 million through Barça Produccions. So Socios perhaps made out ‘okay’ out of this arrangement… because they a) didn’t meet some of their payment obligations (undisclosed as to why) and b) they were partially bought out during this feat of financial engineering.

The sporting angle to this raises a different question.

Broughton’s wider argument on SportBiz is that clubs are sponsorship, licensing and ticketing businesses, and “content is the cost of goods sold for the sponsorship and licensing business. It’s inventory creation.”

(again, H/T to Mike for putting this on my radar)

I agree broadly, but Barcelona, the brand, is worth something. But I think that the chopping up of rights is so thin, and bundling in nascent digital licensing, with little-to-no track record from a revenue perspective, was bound to fail. Oh and wait, doing that but also valuing it at €400m and then $1bn respectively? I mean that was going to bite FC Barcelona at some point down the line.

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