Modernizing
Barcelona's
large-scale
entertainment
venues

The challenge

The post-pandemic era has ignited a global surge in the music and live entertainment industry, driven by emerging technological trends and digital disruption, creating new opportunities for audiences worldwide. Barcelona, a prominent global city deeply intertwined with the visitor economy and experiential offerings, aims to continue excelling in attracting premier, internationally renowned shows while ensuring sustainable economic growth for the city.

In this context, Barcelona’s key venues for large-scale events, the Palau Sant Jordi (with a capacity of 18,000 spectators) and the Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys (with a capacity of 60,000), originally designed for sports and renovated for the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games in the Montjuïc area, are central. Now, three decades later, Barcelona de Serveis Municipals (B:SM), the public entity under the Barcelona City Council responsible for these infrastructures, is reassessing how to modernize these venues to enhance the city’s competitiveness in the global entertainment landscape. Anteverti has been tasked with conducting a comprehensive study to determine the best approach.

Our approach

To achieve this, our research focused on analyzing the positioning of Barcelona’s Palau Sant Jordi and Olympic Stadium as entertainment venues relative to its direct global competitors. The aim was to offer a series of recommendations and quick-wins to modernize the city’s facilities effectively.

Our efforts specifically targeted:

• Identifying best practices and international benchmarks in top-tier arenas, encompassing structural, technological, and promotional aspects that could potentially be applied to the venues.
• Assessing the improvement needs of both venues to solidify Barcelona’s status as a premier destination for hosting a wide range of international cultural and sporting events, ensuring that the venues meet future demands.
• Determining the investment magnitudes required to undertake the necessary reforms.

The impact

Our study enabled Barcelona to identify a series of measures to implement in its venues, taking into account the new consumer demands, the evolution of user experience, current and future technological trends applied to the world of entertainment, their correlation with physical infrastructure and the need for reforms and adjustments, as well as the increasing competition with other more modern or recently renovated arenas in Europe.

As a result, in February 2025, the City Council incorporated the revamp of the Olympic Complex venues and the proposals developed by the project into the announced “New Montjuïc” strategy for 2035, which aims to revitalize this area of the city and make it more connected, dynamic, and vibrant for Barcelona and its citizens. In this context, the transformation begins with the remodelling of the Sant Jordi Club venue, whose auditorium will be able to accommodate flexible audience numbers between 3,500 and 9,000 spectators and offer a range of events previously nonexistent in Barcelona.