Ranking every Barcelona shirt sponsor since 2010 from worst to best

Barcelona is a proud old club in a proud old city. Say what you want about the way modern-day FC Barcelona is run—it hasn’t always been shrouded in the cynicism that 2024 bestows upon, well, everything.

During the Spanish Civil War, the club was actively involved in anti-fascist movements against General Franco and, until as late as 2010, Barca had never had a front-of-shirt sponsor, as they didn’t feel it was in keeping with the club ethos (also they didn’t need the money…).

It’s been a bit up and down since then. We’re ranking every front-of-shirt sponsor Barca have ever had. All five of them.

5. Qatar Airways

Get outta here. Forced a bunch of Australian women to submit to strip searches to look for evidence that one of them was the mother of a newborn baby found in the airport.

Nope. Can’t be doing that. Get in the bin, Qatar Airways.

Regardless of the financial strife the club might’ve been in when Qatar Airways was confirmed as the new sponsor, this just feels like a huge undoing of a legacy built on moral principles and goodwill.

4. Rakuten

Rakuten is sometimes referred to as ‘the Amazon of Japan’.

To go from no sponsor—partially because you set up an incredible academy (La Masia, or, in English, The Farmhouse) to save money and avoid spending big bucks on transfer fees in the wake of financial peril after being on the non-fascist side of a civil war—to putting the Amazon of Japan on the front of your shirts…

Something has gone awry in Catalonia.

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3. Qatar Foundation

On the face of it, this one is a nice, charitable shirt sponsor. Call us cynics but it feels like this might’ve been a Trojan horse aimed at softening the blow of the out-and-out revenue-increasing shirt sponsors to come.

Also it just looked rubbish. That font, man. Yuck. Like it’s been done on an Instagram story. A sort of italic bastard. Absolutely honking. Sort of sh*t you would see printed on the napkins of a hotel that’s desperately trying to get an extra star rating on Trip Advisor. Minging.

2. Spotify

Spotify sort of sums up the internet. It’s absolutely rinsing artists, streaming their music an paying them negligible amounts of money for the privilege. The problem is, unless the artists are already big enough to survive without the widespread reach Spotify allows them, they can’t afford not to have their music on there.

We were happy without it, but it exists now and it’s made everything so easy for the consumer that we now can’t deal without it, but the catch-22 is that it’s made making music financially unviable for working class musicians, who invariably make the best music.

A service that started out with what seemed like a socialist outlook has ended up fuelling elitism on a massive scale. Kind of like FC Barcelona itself…

Anyway, the logo is quite neat, it echos the modern day ethos of the club, and they’re going for the classic Barca colour scheme for the 2024-25 kits, so in it goes at number 2.

1. Unicef

Technically not a front-of-shirt sponsor as Barcelona paid Unicef to appear on the jerseys, it was the first time Barca had featured anything on their jerseys other than their own colours, emblem, numbers, or the odd shirt manufacturer logo.

This was objectively a good thing, as it raised, according to Sportskeeda, €19,000,000 for Unicef, which was used to provide education, sport, and protection from deadly diseases for 1.5million children across the world.

Now, there is an argument to be made that introducing Unicef’s logo to the front of the shirt was the first Trojan horse, followed by the Qatar Foundation, that paved the way for unprecedented commercial sponsorship on Barca jerseys, and that this was all part of a bigger, more insidious plan.

However, we’re ranking Barcelona kit sponsors here and, taken in isolation, Unicef is the best one they’ve had, both in terms of aesthetic appeal, the incredible, almost unbeatable team they had at the time (those kits spanned 2006-2011, the golden age of Barca), and the fact it was a charitable gesture.