In just over a month, Barcelona will return to the Camp Nou for the first time since starting a €1.5billion (£1.3bn; $1.8bn) refurbishment project two years ago. At least, that’s what the club is hoping.
Work on Barca’s stadium has already suffered several
setbacks, with an original return date of November 2024 long since passed. Now
the club is targeting August 10 — when Barca play their traditional
season-opening friendly match, the Joan Gamper Trophy — for the big day.
That date represents a fifth rescheduling of the team’s
expected return. Delays to the project have already forced Barca to play at the
city’s Estadi Olimpic Lluis Companys much longer than expected, but the option
of starting a third consecutive season there appears to have been ruled out.
They no longer have permission to play at the ground, nor do they intend to
apply for it.
Work on the Camp Nou began in June 2023, with the aim of
modernising the ground while increasing its capacity to 105,000, which would be
the largest in European football. The
stadium was initially scheduled to reopen at about 60 per cent capacity in time
for Barca’s 125th anniversary in November 2024 (with full completion in June
2026), but that date has been put back several times.
While work on the Camp Nou went on, Barca made a temporary
home at the Estadi Olimpic Lluis Companys across the city on Montjuic, a ground
that has about 40,000 fewer seats than the old Camp Nou. Barca had always planned to spend the
entirety of the 2023-24 season there, but in early 2025, they had to apply to
the local authorities to allow them to finish the 2024-25 campaign in the
stadium.
In 2023, the club estimated that playing one season at
Montjuic would cost them about €90m (£77m; $106m at current rates) in lost
revenue. They ended up staying for two.
In terms of the new La Liga season, Barca asked for their
first matches to be scheduled away from home and the competition body has
granted this. Barca’s first three games are away trips, with their first home
fixture scheduled for the weekend of Saturday, September 14, when they host
Valencia (the exact date will be confirmed closer to the time). The first round
of the Champions League league phase is due to be played from September 16.
With so many issues still up in the air, though — including
the missing permits and the uncertainty around what capacity the ground can
open at — Barca have not been able to start any ticket sales for matches.
Usually, season ticket sales begin in the first weeks of June, but the process
has still not started. Nor have any tickets gone on sale for the Joan Gamper
friendly next month.
Barca sources remain confident all will be well, but in
terms of alternatives, Barcelona city council sources say it would not be
possible for Barca to return to playing at Montjuic because a series of
concerts are already scheduled there that cannot be cancelled.
Barca have pointed to the discovery of an unknown
high-voltage line on the site, the company that was set to supply the iron for
the stadium going bankrupt, bureaucratic problems in bringing in skilled labour
from outside the European Union, and various problems that Limak had with
several suppliers trying to increase raw material costs.
Having the Camp Nou ready to host games won’t just provide
the club with a bigger source of income and put an end to the rent they pay to
play at Montjuic, it will also have a direct impact on their capacity to sign
and register new players.
The Catalans are currently above the salary limit that La
Liga set for them, which means the competition forces them to offload current
salaries before registering new ones. A
major reason they are above their salary cap is that Barcelona’s latest asset
sale — VIP seating at the revamped Camp Nou — could not be included in their
current budget.
The budget for the entire Espai Barca — the name for the
extensive renovation project, which also includes the Palau Blaugrana
multi-sport arena, the campus and the urban development of the area — is
€1.5bn.
Major construction projects in any sphere of life inevitably
run into delays, but you can’t postpone a football club’s new season in the way
that you can keep setting back the opening of a new railway line like HST2 in
the UK.
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