Spotify Camp Nou on a Tuesday morning is a different kind of place. The stands are empty, the pitch is undisturbed, and there are no 105,000 voices filling the air above Les Corts.
But across 140 connected rooms, the technology is running. Screens are live. Control systems are active. Audio is routed and ready. The stadium that the world associates with ninety minutes of football is, on days like this, doing something else entirely.
That is the point of the Espai Barça project. And it is the reason Crestron’s work here matters to anyone in the enterprise technology industry, not just those who follow La Liga.
How Espai Barça Is Rebuilding the Stadium Business Model
Before the transformation began, Spotify Camp Nou, the home of FC Barcelona, operated as most major football stadiums do: intensely and occasionally. According to Antonio Ortega, Crestron’s Regional Sales Director for Iberica and Italy, the venue was being used roughly 22 days a year. The infrastructure supporting one of the most famous sporting arenas in the world sat largely idle for the other 343.
The Espai Barça project, an over a billion euro redevelopment of the stadium and its surrounding facilities in the Les Corts neighbourhood of Barcelona, is designed to close that gap. The wider campus is huge, including Estadi Johan Cruyff for training and youth sport, Nou Palau Blaugrana for concerts and indoor sport, and Campus Barça, a cultural and commercial hub housing a museum, flagship store, and public space. At the centre sits Spotify Camp Nou, redesigned for year-round community events, corporate gatherings, and premium hospitality. Crestron, the Official Smart Hospitality Systems Partner of Espai Barça, is the technology platform running across most of those spaces.
“It’s becoming a 365-day-a-year complex that will encompass a variety of spaces to host different events simultaneously, providing the city a reference location and maximise additional revenue to the club,” says Ortega.
Inside the Hybrid Meeting Rooms at Spotify Camp Nou
The clearest way to understand what Crestron has built here is to look at what the individual spaces can do.
The Pitch Club, the venue’s main hospitality hub, runs a multizone audio system using DM NAX Audio-over-IP with 4K video distribution throughout for live match feeds, presentations, or branded content. Its flexible layout serves matchday hospitality and corporate functions in the same space without reconfiguration from scratch.
In The Presidential Suite, the technology is built into the room’s architecture to enhance the experience rather than announce itself, creating a premium environment for high-level guests where AV and UC capability is present without dominating the room.
The Boardroom, a space designed for the club’s senior decision-makers, runs 1 Beyond cameras with Automate VX speaker tracking, Dante-based audio, and large-format displays. In all but its postcode, it is a high-specification hybrid meeting room.
The VIP Suites may be the most intriguing spaces in the building. Each box carries displays for watching the match or delivering a presentation, Bluetooth audio from personal devices integrated into the central system, motorised blinds for privacy, and touchscreen control throughout. The same space that hosts premium matchday hospitality can pivot to a private business meeting the following morning, without a support team in the room to make it happen.
“Many of the hospitality areas also include UC solutions, allowing them to host sessions, presentations, and events that require hybrid experiences,” says Miguel Castro, Lead AV Technology Integrator on the project. “This gives the venue greater flexibility, enabling premium spaces to function not only on match days, but also as modern collaboration environments throughout the year.”
The AV and UC Infrastructure Running 140-Plus Rooms
What makes the Espai Barça deployment significant at an infrastructure level is the consistency running across all of those spaces. DM NVX AV-over-IP handles 4K video distribution throughout the venue. DM NAX Audio-over-IP carries audio from the locker rooms to the roof terrace. Crestron Virtual Control manages the entire estate from a single centralised platform, while XiO Cloud provides remote monitoring and proactive troubleshooting across all 140-plus rooms on site. The same architecture routing music for a private event on a Thursday evening is the same architecture running a Teams meeting in the boardroom the following morning.
Jorge Laborda, Engineering and Sustainability Manager at Espai Barça, says the infrastructure requirement shaped the decision. “Today, the new icons of great cities are their stadiums. Everything begins with the fans, but our ambition extends beyond match day. To create a complete destination experience, we have trusted on Crestron as our Official Smart Hospitality Systems Partner”
Crestron, Espai Barça, and the 365-Day Venue
“My biggest surprise joining this organisation was seeing how amazing everything operates behind the football club,” says Laborda. “We are selling more than football. We are selling experiences, and the Crestron technology helps ensure that remains a key differentiator of this venue.”
Spotify Camp Nou is not the story of a stadium that got an AV upgrade. It is the story of a cultural institution that looked at the gap between what it was using and what it could be, and built the infrastructure to close it.
