Barcelona’s self-made kits stuck in limbo awaiting Nike approval

FC Barcelona (Barça) has decided to sell off the kits it produced in-house during recent negotiations with its longtime sponsor, Nike. There’s only one problem: it needs Nike’s permission to proceed with the sale, and as of this writing the club has yet to obtain it.

Nike’s sponsorship of Barça is both the most expensive and the longest in duration of the current deals in LaLiga. The brand first signed with the club in 1998. According to Soccer Bible, reporting at the time, the few months to March 2024 were a struggle between club and sponsor “on several unspecified points.” According to El País, however, one of those points was Barça’s desire to recover control of its e-commerce.

Anyhow, with the deal then in effect set to expire only four years later, in June 2028, Barça began looking for alternatives. One was to quit Nike and find a different sponsor, the top contenders being Puma, New Balance and Hummel. Another – lest the club fail in its negotiations and be left with nothing to wear or sell – was to produce its own kits.

Barça poured at least €4 million into some 300,000 kits and jerseys, which have languished ever since at a warehouse somewhere in Barcelona province. as El País has established, each jersey bears a price of €89 and, the club itself aside, the kits advertise only one entity: Barça Innovation Hub (BIHUB) – Barça’s wholly-owned venture-capital wing and tech platform, founded in 2017.

Josep Maria Meseguer, head of Barça Licensing and Merchandising (BLM), a subsidiary founded in 2018 to handle merchandise sales, told El País early this month that the club had been in need of “a plan B,” one that would cover not only football but also “basketball, volleyball, rugby, hockey […].” Meseguer confirms that the non-Nike garments are in storage, have never seen the light of day and will not see it anytime soon, Nike holding exclusive rights to technical apparel.

In December 2024 Barça’s general assembly approved a new, 14-year deal with Nike. Club Treasurer Ferran Olivé then called it “a contract between equals, because Nike needs Barça as much as Barça needs Nike.” This deal is to “accelerate the development of BLM’s business,” enable the club to develop its own product lines under the Barça brand and restore, through BLM, club control of retail sales and e-commerce.

According to BeIn Sports, the contract and its signing bonus could earn Barça about €120 million per season. The deal’s value is to rise in 2028, date of the old deal’s expiry, and continue to rise through its own expiry, in 2038.

How unusual is this?

Team-produced kits are unusual in the upper reaches of sport. The big four leagues in the US, for instance, tend to negotiate league-wide deals. Right now Nike is in charge of these matters for the NFL and the NBA, and Nike has a partnership with Fanatics for MLB, while Fanatics has a partnership with Adidas for the NHL.

That said, such kits are the least unusual in top-flight association football, where we count 20-odd instances.