By Erik Alonso, CEO of Belhasa Sports & No Limits Sports
FC Barcelona has just announced it made $1.174 million from its YouTube channel – that is more than most clubs make from their entire stadium in a season.
That is a new revenue record for Barcelona, beating their previous high of 2021/22 ($1.171 million), up 25% on last year, and up 99% against 2023/24. Over two years it has gone from a strong number to the best in 15 seasons.
This happened without the club winning a trophy and no galactic player signing to spike engagement. Just a content and monetisation strategy that almost nobody else in football has actually understood for what it is: a media business with a sports brand attached, not a promotional channel.
The number that matters isn’t the revenue. It’s the asset producing it: 26.2 million subscribers, over 15,000 videos published, 7.643 billion cumulative views since the channel launched in February 2006.
Barcelona crossed 20 million subscribers back in January 2025, becoming the first sports club in the world to do it. You don’t build that with a community manager posting highlights after the final whistle.
You build it with a dedicated business unit, Barça Media 360, that treats audience as what it actually is: a balance sheet item you monetize through YouTube Membership, direct commercialization of digital assets, and an editorial offer engineered for how people consume content today.
Compare that to the rest of the big club field: Real Madrid hasn’t reached 20 million subscribers, Liverpool sit at 12.5 million, Juventus at 14.5 million, Manchester United at 11.2 million, PSG at 10.4 million.
According to CIES Football Observatory figures, Barcelona’s subscriber base is roughly four times that of Atletico Madrid and ten times that of AC Milan.
Barcelona isn’t winning this category. It’s owning it by a margin that in any other industry would be called market power, and that margin is playing a significant part of the club’s push toward a billion-euro turnover this season.
And technology is available to everyone. The difference is having the right people, the right strategy and the discipline to treat audience as an asset rather than an output.
Clubs that think like media businesses will win the next decade. Most people see 26 million subscribers and billions of views, but few see the organizational structure behind it.
What Barcelona has built is not a social media department but an audience infrastructure with dedicated teams, commercial integration, content production and long-term monetisation strategy.
The clubs that understand (and treat) audience as an asset rather than an engagement metric will have a structural advantage over the next decade.
So here’s the real question for every other boardroom in club football: why are you still running your owned channels like a communications department, when Barcelona just proved they can be a structural revenue line inside a billion-euro turnover plan?
Erik Alonso is CEO of Belhasa Sports & No Limits Sports, an international sports advisory firm that works with clubs, investors and rights holders on commercial strategy, audience monetisation, investment and long-term value creation across the sports industry. Contact him at [email protected]