While that is the scenario, both these clubs have taken different paths of reaching the pinnacle of football in terms of the strategies employed by both these clubs. Before broadcasting of matches, the main source of revenue for any sports team was gate receipts. Fans would buy season tickets and match-day tickets and the clubs would concentrate their strategies on maintaining the ticket sales through discounts and sometimes splurging on that one particular star player who had enough star power to pull the fans into the stadium. Both Real Madrid and Barcelona still follow that model to date apart from other …show more content…
This show how well Real Madrid placed their merchandising model. Real Madrid were one of the first few football clubs to take an advantage of licensing and merchandising in football and they did reap dividends of it.
Barcelona on the other hand followed a long term strategy of slowly building a team from their own youth academy and making them into superstars and thus reaping the benefits of it at a very low expense. The Barcelona squad that won the sextuple in 2008-09 had 6 players that graduated from La Masia, their own youth academy. And such a phenomenon in world football is unheard of, a team capturing everything with a foundation of their own youth. Thereby, accumulating more fans on the process. More fans results into more of club merchandise and thus extra