The director in charge of overseeing FC Barcelona’s ambitious expansion plans has said that the €600m leisure campus planned by the club will reinvigorate the city and boost tourism.

The Espai Barça project – described by club president Josep Maria Bartomeu as “the most important sports project in Europe and the world” – will create a pedestrianised, landscaped boulevard surrounding the club’s famous Camp Nou stadium.

The district will integrate with the city 24/7 as a new neighbourhood of restaurants, cafés, sports facilities and the club’s museum, hotel and megastore.

Jordi Moix, commissioner for the project, told Sports Management that the project “will create a new destination for the city.”

“Barcelona is a successful city in terms of tourism, but a large percentage of that is concentrated in the old part of town around the Sagrada Familia,” he said. “We want to diversify that.

“We want to liberate this space for the neighbourhood. Espai Barça won’t be like an amusement park where you have to pay to enter. We’re a social club and we’re part of this city. It doesn’t make sense for us to build fences.

“We already have almost two million visitors per year on non match-days, even though we’re currently offering very limited possibilities to extend the FC Barcelona experience for them. They visit the stadium museum and we have two very small restaurants. This is what we’ll improve [with Espai Barca]. Nothing similar is being done on the same scale anywhere in the world, as far as I’m aware.”

Moix suggested the project will be financed through naming rights for the campus, and pledged that the board “will not jeopardise the finances of the club for this investment.”

In addition to the planned leisure facilities, three major sporting facility projects are planned for Espai Barça.

Camp Nou will be completely revamped at a cost of €360m – with a new roof installed and capacity increased from 90,000 to approximately 105,000. A further €90m will be spent on building a new Palau Blaugrana, a multi-purpose arena home for the club’s basketball, roller hockey, handball and futsal teams, as well as an ice rink. Finally, the club’s Mini Estadi – a small stadium that hosts the club’s B-Team, women’s and youth sides – will be demolished and rebuilt alongside the club’s training facilities in a suburban district at a cost of €12m.

An in-depth feature on FC Barcelona’’s ambitious plans for Espai Barrça can be found in the latest issue of CLADmag., Sports Management's sister publication.