Camp Nou Renaming Would Be Another Step Towards Barcelona's Identity Loss

Perhaps this should come as no surprise by now, but Barcelona are considering allowing the Camp Nou's name to be changed in order to generate more revenue.

Qatar Airways, who sponsor Barcelona, may end up with their moniker as part of a new title for the stadium.

CEO Akbar al Baker said, per Sport: "Everything is possible for our company, we are open to surprises and one of them could be the name of the Camp Nou."

Meanwhile, Barcelona's economic vice-president, Javier Faus, says that Barcelona are happy with Qatar Airways as sponsors.

He said: "We need a new sponsor, we have zero problems with Qatar, so it will be a quick decision."

It seems these days that the club is keen to make money in every way they can, even if it means trampling on tradition and history.

Take, for example, the decision to feature horizontal stripes instead of vertical ones on next season's kit.

Sport's Javier Giraldo wrote:

In spite of the anger over the horizontal stripes rather than vertical, the kit is expected to be a bestseller, not least because the novelty will be a great attraction to overseas fans. Many of them won't have the same sentimental or historical impediments to liking the change from vertical to sideways.

While lifelong members have already reacted with great skepticism to the kit, fans from other countries have already declared they like it, and some Nike distributors have already noted the high demand generated by the new shirt.

The Telegraph's Jim White was scathing when he evaluated Barcelona's decision to change the kit design. He wrote:

And the change of shirt design is indication of how far they have slipped into the cesspool long occupied by their rivals. Even those involved in the brutally Darwinian economics of baseball treat the playing uniform as sacrosanct, refusing to carry commercial logos and retaining long-standing designs. Barca, though, can no longer afford such niceties. This is about economics. Despite having the second largest annual income in the world game, despite earning 10 times the television revenue of the side finishing bottom of La Liga, they trade at an eye-watering annual loss. Currently they are hamstrung by debt totalling half a billion euros. If their commercial partners at Nike are advising that hoops will sell, who are they to argue? Sell away.

There have been various flashpoints during the past few years that have given people cause to believe that Barcelona have "sold their soul."

One of the more recent issues was the Neymar transfer, which was far more expensive than the club first declared, and only upon further investigation did the real figures come out.

Then there was the signing of Luis Suarez, a player who had previously been punished for racism and as recently as last October insisted he was harshly done by in an interview with Barca Magazine (via The Guardian).

Add to that the biting and the diving that he's known for, and it's easy to understand why people believed Suarez's signing compromised Barcelona's identity and values.

To date, Suarez hasn't been embroiled in any controversy in a Barcelona shirt, although the club couldn't have believed that life would be easy with him, given his track record.

Perhaps the biggest example of how Barcelona have lost their identity was the way they took on a shirt sponsor.

After going for more than 100 years without anything blemishing the front of their shirts, they took on UNICEF as a sponsor, although they paid the charity to put the name on the front of their shirts.

This was a move that everyone hailed Barcelona for; it was generous.

It was also clever because it paved the way for other sponsors in the future. The indignation that would have arisen had Barcelona moved straight into commercial sponsorship was diluted by UNICEF having been on the front of the shirt already.

As Sid Lowe said in The Guardian, former president Sandro Rosell, "will be remembered as the man who sold Eric Abidal and sold the shirt to Qatar Airways."

However, the latest developments regarding the kit and the potential renaming of the stadium show that this wasn't a one-off, but rather a trend.