Part 1 - Empire State

“Barça is a global club. But the world is a big place, and right now we are occupying very little space.”

Josep Bartomeu, Barcelona president

Last September, Barcelona opened their first office in New York, and they decided to make a bit of an entrance. Outside the Waldorf Astoria where the club’s executives and officials were staying, the Barcelona flag flew alongside the Stars and Stripes. At night, the Empire State Building was lit up in the club’s red and blue colours. Ronaldinho made a surprise appearance at a Bronx secondary school and played football with gawping kids. “We want to get closer to our fans,” explained club president Josep Bartomeu.

But to discover the real reason for Barcelona’s visit, you had to go to an upmarket restaurant in midtown Manhattan. There, over a sumptuous liquid lunch, Bartomeu and vice-president Manel Arroyo spent the day schmoozing executives from some of Wall Street’s blue-chip companies: Morgan Stanley, PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG, BlackRock.

Since Bartomeu took over as president in 2014, he has had two main aims: to burnish the club’s global reputation, and then use that reputation to print money. His stated goal is to make Barcelona the first club in history to break €1 billion in revenue. And because Barcelona already make plenty of money in Spain, that money, as Bartomeu puts it, “must come from the international market”.