Barcelona City Council nod to Camp Nou revamp

Article posted by Coliseum, April 29^th, 2022

Image: MJR Group Ltd./Coliseum

The Barcelona City Council (Spain) has granted the construction permit for the renovation of Camp Nou, which the LaLiga team FC Barcelona plans to begin next June. The club will play its 2023-2024 season games at the Lluís Companys Olympic Stadium in Barcelona, Spain.

The ‘as’ stated that FC Barcelona will begin renovation work on its Camp Nou Stadium this June after the Catalan City Council approved the license for the work with both FC Barcelona President, Joan Laporta, and the Mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, announcing the news on April 28^th.

Futbol Club Barcelona, commonly referred to as Barcelona and colloquially known as Barça, is a Spanish professional football club based in Barcelona (Spain), which competes in LaLiga, the top flight of Spanish football.

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The 99,354-capacity Camp Nou is a football stadium in Barcelona, Spain. It opened in 1957 and has been the home stadium of FC Barcelona since its completion.

The Espai Barça development plan goes well beyond modernization and reconstruction of FC Barcelona’s home venue Camp Nou. In addition to increasing the capacity of the current stadium to 105,000 from circa 99,000 and completely revamping the current structure of the Camp Nou, the Espai Barça project entails building a new Palau Blaugrana with a capacity of 15,000, an additional court with a capacity of 2,000, an ice rink, a new social area, a new commercial area, revamped club offices, La Masía (read FC Barcelona’s youth academy), and an additional 5,000 parking spots. This ambitious initiative has been in work for several years and is scheduled to be ready for the 2024-2025 seasons. In April 2014, Espai Barça was approved by the club’s members with a budget of $700 million.

Informed Laporta at a ceremony held at Barcelona’s City hall, “We will start work this coming June to carry out the remodeling works of the stadium. It will be the largest and most innovative sports and entertainment space to be built in a City.”

The ‘as’ further stated that the Espai Barça project foresees the renovation of the stadium and its surroundings, including the remodeling of the sports center and adjoining spaces. The work will force FC Barcelona to play one season (2023-2024 campaign) at the Lluís Companys Olympic Stadium.

The 55,926-capacity Lluís Companys Olympic Stadium is a stadium in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. Originally built in 1927 for the 1929 International Exposition in the City, it was renovated in 1989 to be the main stadium for the 1992 Summer Olympics and 1992 Summer Paralympics.

In the 2022-2023 seasons, the work “Will concentrate on the first and second stands, the technological area, the stadium’s surroundings, and the exterior urbanization”. During that time, FC Barcelona will continue to play at the Camp Nou, whose capacity “will be practically 100 percent”, according to Laporta and the following 2023-2024 seasons, Barcelona will move to the Lluís Companys Olympic Stadium.

The 2025-2026 seasons will coincide with the end of the work, although Laporta said that during that year the stadium will still not be operating at 100 percent capacity, although its capacity “will be higher than the 50 percent we foresee us having for the 2024-2025 seasons”.

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