Grass to get greener in Spanish stadiums

The grass is getting greener in Spanish soccer.

In an attempt to catch up with the financially dominant Premier League, Spain’s top teams are coming up with new ways to promote the sport in their country and improve its global audience share.

And it’s all about the look, beyond the silky skills of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo.

The league introduced an audiovisual rule for this season, forcing clubs to make their stadiums look better on TV if they wanted to cash in on Spain’s improved broadcasting deals. That meant giving a lick of paint to some of the more rundown stadiums, moving spectators to certain areas to ensure they are in camera shot, brightening up advertising hoardings and, yes, making the grass greener on the fields.

“The problem with Spain,” Adolfo Bara, the Spanish league’s marketing director, said on the sidelines of the SoccerEx convention, “is that it’s really hot in summer. If you look, in September in some of the stadiums, the grass was yellow..”

Comply with these new audiovisual rules and a club gets more money out of Spain’s new TVb roadcasting contracts, which gives the smaller teams a greater share of overall revenue compared to previous years when Real Madrid and Barcelona hogged the earnings.

Borja Gonzalez, stadium business manager at Athletic Bilbao, told The Associated Press at SoccerEx that among the changes at his club’s renovated San Mames ground was changing the colour of the sponsor’s messages on hoardings surrounding the field to make them red and white. They are the colours worn by Bilbao.