Welcome to the Sports Illustrated Planet Football Podcast. I'm Grant Wall. I am in New York at Smith Field Hall. This is the home bar in New York for FC Barcelona. My guest today is FC Barcelona President Joseph Maria Bartomeo who's in

New York launching Barcelona's new U.S. based office here.

Thank you for joining me.

No, thank you for your time and thank you for trying to host us also in your program.

Wonderful.

I wanted to start just by saying congratulations

on opening this New York City office for Barca.

Why do you want to be here full time as a club? Well, thank because it has been a project that we started a few

months ago and the experience of Barcelona of our club is huge and in the last few months we have a new plan,

CZIC plan to expand our club, our brand all over the world and of course we were

already working with companies in U.S. entities.

We were already opening soccer schools in U.S.

It was time to be here permanently.

We have a lot of fans, a lot of people that love football in the US and they love bars.

And opening office means that we want to be with them, we want to be closer to them, and

we want to extend our relationship with them and also extend it.

That's why we are here in the US, not to be here in a permanent way and we will do a lot of projects.

Mainly focus on opening new soccer schools all over the US and also of course to try to find new partners, new sponsorships, new companies that would like to be together with us and finally of

course we think about sport and about sport I mean we have two versions one version is a

professional sport which we think we are studying that maybe with our women professional team

we could probably play the soccer women's league in the US and then children. One of our most important goals

objective in the club is to work with children and with UNITAF. We have agreements with Belinda and Bill Gates Foundation, we have agreements,

...