Barcelona's iconic Camp Nou looks set to be renamed after Spotify sponsorship deal | OneFootball

Barcelona‘s Camp Nou stadium is one of the most iconic grounds in football.

Camp Nou is the largest stadium in Europe; its capacity surpasses even Wembley by around 10,000. Anyone who has visited the hallowed turf in Barcelona will understand how truly gargantuan the stands surrounding the pitch are.

The stadium’s atmosphere is always electric, which is unsurprising as nearly 100,000 supporters are crammed inside its colossal walls for the majority of games.

The ground is steeped in history thanks to Barcelona’s huge amount of success in the 64 years since the stadium first opened. Camp Nou has witnessed several important finals and, of course, is one of the two homes of El Clasico alongside Real Madrid’s Bernabeu.

But a new sponsorship deal with streaming giants Spotify could see the ground’s name changed, according to a recent report from RAC1, via Marca.

Barcelona have an unusual history with sponsors, refusing to have any sponsorship on the club’s shirts until 2006. But even then, it was only for the charity UNICEF.

In 2011 the club finally broke tradition and announced an official sponsorship with the Qatar Foundation, which eventually became Qatar Airways.

With Barca’s most recent sponsorship deal with Rakuten coming to an end soon, the club has now agreed on a whopping £237million deal with streaming service Spotify.

Barcelona’s financial problems have been well publicised in recent seasons, so it was clear the club would attempt to seek out as much money as possible from any future sponsorship deals.

But fans will be upset to find out that, according to reports, the deal with Spotify includes the naming rights to the stadium. According to RAC1, via Marca, once the sponsorship is official, the Camp Nou will be renamed to the ‘Spotify Camp Nou’.

It certainly doesn’t have quite the same ring to it as the current name.

But Barcelona are far from the first club to rebrand their stadium based on a sponsorship deal.

The most infamous name-change in recent years was, of course, St James’ Park. The stadium was rebranded as the ‘Sports Direct Arena’ after the takeover of Newcastle by Sports Direct owner Mike Ashley. But after huge amounts of uproar amongst the Toon Army, the original name was eventually reinstated.

The majority of clubs who have changed their stadium names for a sponsor have returned to their original names once the sponsorship deal has run its course, but in general, that has done little to stem complaints from fans at the time.

It’s hard to imagine that Barcelona fans will take kindly to the renaming of their iconic stadium, but the change is yet to be officially announced by either Spotify or Barcelona.

If the change does come to fruition, it will definitely be interesting to see the response.