FC Barcelona becomes first sports club to surpass 5 million subscribers on YouTube

FC Barcelona, which was already the world leader among sports clubs on YouTube, has become the first to surpass the 5 million subscriber threshold, a milestone that has been reached thanks to spectacular growth over the past year, and which keeps Barça at the head of the pack on the internet’s biggest video sharing platform.

According to data from the past 365 days, Barça is a dominant force in the realm of online video: over the past year, Barça’s official YouTube channel has added 1,952,334 new subscribers, easily beating its closest competitors. Thanks to this growth, FC Barcelona, as of the publication of this article, has 5,174,052 subscribers — ahead of Real Madrid (3,910,610), Juventus (1,487,998), Liverpool (1,457,933), and Manchester City (1,429,243).

Among the nearly two million new subscribers attained in the last 12 months, one period that particularly stands out is the first week of January 2018, when Barça registered 127,776 new subscribers, which was the Club's largest jump of the year. That week, Barça published a series of videos related to the signing of Philippe Coutinho and his arrival in Barcelona. In fact, Brazil, which is where Coutinho hails from, is one of the main sources of Barça’s increase in new subscribers, in addition to India, Mexico, and Indonesia.

Beyond videos linked to the team’s new signings, the highest number of views during the 2017/18 season stemmed from the farewell of Club icon Andrés Iniesta, the team’s on-the-field celebrations after beating Sevilla in the Copa del Rey final, and the popular Barça Emojis video starring World Cup winners Samuel Umtiti and Ousmane Dembélé.

But Barça’s YouTube channel isn’t just tops in subscribers — it also leads in the number of views, boasting numbers that nearly triple those of its rivals. Last season, Barça’s YouTube videos accumulated some 213 million views, almost three times more than adversaries Manchester City, Liverpool, and Real Madrid.

FC Barcelona was one of the first clubs to have a presence on YouTube, where it launched its official channel in February 2006. Since then, Barça has published around 18,000 videos, giving its subscribers a front row seat to one of the most successful eras in Club history. But not only that, they’ve seen how the content has evolved over time, with a clear focus on entertainment, as well as the ongoing changes to the user experience, such as the ever-increasing use of mobile devices, which now account for some 70% of total views.