FC Barcelona is going to establish the headquarters of its content subsidiary, Barça Media, in the Netherlands, so that it can be listed on the Nasdaq, the United States technology stock market, according to El País and includes the documentation that the Blaugrana club has registered before the US securities regulator, the SEC.
Barça thus follows in the footsteps of the construction company Ferrovial, which this year has led a controversial move of its headquarters to Amsterdam to make the leap to Wall Street, or Wallbox, a Catalan electric charger company that used a company in the Netherlands to go out to listing on the Nasdaq in 2021.
The Blaugrana club’s plan is to list Barça Media in the US, establishing the legal headquarters in the Netherlands, without moving the operational or business headquarters there. To do this, it will merge with a Spac, a common vehicle for this type of operation in the US, called Mountain & Co. I Acquisition Corp. The Dutch company listed on the Nasdaq, the Wall Street technology index, will have a subsidiary in Spain that It will be the one that manages the business.
The listing on Nasdaq is one of the financial “levers” that the president of FC Barcelona, Joan Laporta, has referred to in order to balance the club’s accounts and for LaLiga to allow it to register players, after the mismatches between income and expenses generated by the staff and the high debt of the team.
The Spac that is going to merge with Barça Media has as its main shareholder the German businessman Cornelius Boersch, owner of 17.6% of the capital, but the operation is in the hands of four US funds that control more than half of the shares: Calamos Investment Trust (11.1%), Highbridge Capital Management (11.5%), Saba Capital Management (14.0%) and Glazer Capital (13.9%). He is also a director and prominent investor of Spac, with 1.9% of the capital, Utz Claassen, who was a reference shareholder of Mallorca.
Spac and Barça have given themselves until August 11, 2024 to complete the operation, although they expect it to be closed before the end of this year. The merger agreement values the Blaugrana club’s content business at around 900 million euros, which includes audiovisual content, Barça cryptocurrencies, NFTs (non-fungible digital assets), avatars, content to be exploited on virtual reality platforms or content for eSports.
