Barça TV closes its doors. For economic reasons, the Blaugrana channel, which has been operating since 1996 and is currently managed by Telefonica, will broadcast for the last time on June 30. This decision will mean the departure of around 150 professionals from the club, between contracted and collaborators.
The club’s decision was communicated to the channel workers this Thursday in a meeting that was held at 4:00 p.m. They also met with the 12 workers from Barça Studios, the production company that brings together all of FC Barcelona’s audiovisual offerings and which is owned by the club. They were informed that for them, as workers of the entity, there will be no changes and that it is not ruled out that some of the Barça TV workers could join the squad. They will not be by any means all. Without Barça TV and with Barça Studios, new formulas are being sought to maintain the club’s image and continue broadcasting its content on its social networks.
Club sources familiar with the facts point out to this newspaper that the entity chaired by Joan Laporta has decided not to renew the contractual relationship with TBSC Barcelona Producciones SLU (Telefónica), the company that the club subcontracted in 2015 to manage its television channel. Telefonica received 6.7 million euros per year from the club and television cost 14 million. The club, immersed in an unprecedented economic crisis, argues that it cannot consider integrating television again and taking charge of the salaries of the channel’s workers.
“It is a very complicated situation. We lose a club instrument that was already known not to be created to have an audience. But it is not financially sustainable, the situation is very complicatedâ€, maintain the aforementioned sources who insist that President Joan Laporta “was one of the few who bet on television. He even promoted new programming to make content more attractive. A programming that bet a lot on the direct ones and the protagonists â€. To this end, last July, the board of directors announced that the club was hiring television producer Toni Cruz as an external consultant to lead the transformation of Barça TV. “The objective is to turn television into a new innovative multimedia project adapted to the new information and entertainment needs that FC Barcelona requires as a sports entity with international repercussions,” the statement read. Despite not looking for an audience, the economy and financial fair play have been too heavy.
In this way, on June 30 the Blaugrana channel will stop broadcasting after 27 years. It was launched by the audiovisual production company Telefónica Sports on September 16, 1996. This production company managed television until February 1, 2004, the date on which the club acquired its rights during the first stage of Joan Laporta as president.
Due to the excessive cost that its maintenance entailed for the club, the channel began to be operated by Mediapro on October 13, 2011 under the presidency of Sandro Rosell..2 Four years later, on July 1, 2015, the channel became be operated and produced by Telefónica, thanks to a global agreement signed with the multinational.
It has not been an easy course for the workers of Barça TV who on December 31, after several meetings with Telefonica, began a strike to defend improvements in their working conditions. They argued that the conditions of their more than 100 employees were increasingly difficult to digest. There were no salary increases since 2015, the annual rise in the CPI was eliminated and the majority of cases whose payrolls did not exceed 1,200 euros per month. Nor were night shifts or overtime charged, while the bonuses that workers usually receive for working on holidays such as Christmas had been considerably reduced. Nor had they invested in audiovisual material to improve the new content promoted by Toni Cruz.
“We are aware of the collective’s problems with Telefónica and we empathize with the workers who have always been loyal to television. We are trying to influence to improve conditions”, explained the president Joan Laporta in the interview he gave to Barça TV itself at the end of the year . The president even received the members of the committee accompanied by the director of human resources, Carles Cendrós, the external consultant for Barça TV, Toni Cruz, and several lawyers.
On February 15, after several days of strikes that coincided with the first team’s pre-matches and post-matches, the Barça committee reached a minimum agreement. that allowed them to recover a small part of the purchasing power. Now they hope that the layoffs generated by the closure of a historic channel will allow them to maintain the seniority conditions that some workers have maintained since 1996.
