The Sports Team Emerging as One of the World’s Iconic Social Brands ⚽ (HBBIP #154)

Each week, we'll bring you select insights from our newsletter, How to Build Brands and Influence People (HBBIP). To have all of these insights delivered directly to your inbox, subscribe today! 

Just when you thought we were done with soccer content after Parts Uno and Dos of our World Cup Coverage, I’m back with more highlights from the world’s favorite game.

So there’s the World Cup, which is neat, and the Premier League, which I’ve covered in HBBIP before. But did you know that there’s at least one other soccer league, and a pretty popular one at that?

Turns out there’s the Premier League, and then there’s the League—LaLiga, that is. It’s Spanish. Maybe you already knew about it. And if so, maybe you’ve already heard of…

The Top Brand of All Time (of the Week): FC Barcelona

These guys seem like a pretty big deal.

Dating all the way back to 1899, FC Barcelona was originally composed of a rag-tag group of Swiss, English, German, and Catalan footballers. Though it’s always claimed to be “More Than a Club,” more than a century later, FC Barcelona is more than more than a club. As one of the most famous, decorated, and iconic sports franchises in the world—not to mention one of the most valuable—FC Barcelona is a brand unto itself.

And as one of the world’s most recognized, beloved, and (in Madrid) detested brands, it’s fair game to ask…

How Is FC Barcelona Performing on Social Media?

FC Barcelona Creator Count, 2022 - 2025

Over the past four years, FC Barcelona has expanded its global creator count from 9k fans to 30.7k diehards, a 3.4x increase. There was a fairly steady rise throughout this period, culminating in a massive spike in 2025, when the club’s network nearly doubled in size.

I also want to point out the scale here—30k creators is a lot! But that scale will become even more apparent in due time.

FC Barcelona Post Count, 2022 - 2025

In keeping with a larger fanbase, FC Barcelona’s post count swelled from 67.3k posts in 2022 to 396.5k posts in 2025, a 5.9x surge. As with the previously established pattern, creator posts more than doubled between 2024 and 2025 alone, demonstrating a dramatic increase in conversation surrounding the club. We’ll soon get into the reasons for that increase soon, and the type of content fueling that conversation, but for now, more growth stats!

FC Barcelona EMV, 2022 - 2025

Earned Media Value (EMV), a metric that gauges the virality and impact of individual content on social media conversations, improved from $907.8M EMV in 2022 to $5.1B in 2025, a 5.6x increase. Again, scale scale scale: $5B EMV is, like, Apple or Coca-Cola territory. FC Barcelona is one of the world’s most iconic brands, and social media treats it as such.

                                                                                                   FC Barcelona Impressions, 2022 - 2025

Sorry to sound like a broken record, but how’s this for scale: between 2022 and 2025, FC Barcelona’s impressions expanded from 13B to 76.6B. Sure, that’s a 5.9x increase, but again, I really can’t stress this enough: nearly 80 billion impressions in a calendar year! That’s everyone on earth consuming FC Barcelona content ten times! I legitimately don’t think I’ve ever seen this sort of reach before.

FC Barcelona Engagements, 2022 - 2025

Finally, FC Barcelona’s engagements rose from 1.1B in 2022 to 4.1B in 2025, a 3.7x increase. The pattern looked similar, and this remains extremely impressive, but I’m still wrapping my head around 80B impressions, so I apologize if I give engagements the short end of the stick.

What's FC Barcelona Channel Breakdown?

FC Barcelona's Share of Impressions by Platform, September 2025 - August 2026

Instagram is FC Barcelona's primary engine for that crazy global impressions count, generating more than half of the club’s total. TikTok provides a substantial secondary audience, while YouTube and Facebook each contribute additional scale. Generally, Facebook and YouTube are both responsible for high-impact posts like match highlights, but Instagram and TikTok have them beat on volume.

FC Barcelona's Share of Engagements by Platform, September 2025 - August 2026

Here we have a pretty balanced picture. Instagram also leads engagement, accounting for nearly half the haul. But TikTok increases its share, generating more than one-third, and underscoring its importance as the club's strongest secondary engagement platform. Facebook contributes a meaningful share of interactions, while YouTube fades a little.

Who Are FC Barcelona's Creators?

1. Fabrizio Romano, El Clásico, and a La Liga Title Fuel Content

Name a more iconic trio. I’ll wait.

From September 2025 to August 2026, FC Barcelona's community of 60.3k creators generated $7.9B EMV. Its top 10 EMV-drivers alone accounted for $1.3B (16.9%) of this total. I’ve written about a lot of brands, but this is a nearly unprecedented scale. We’re in rarified air. In a sense, FC Barcelona is less of a brand, and its creators constitute less of a traditional ambassador program, than the whole thing being a global media ecosystem unto itself. Yet even within this powerful ecosystem, a few voices stand out.

Fabrizio Romano, a preeminent soccer journalist whom I’ve mentioned in my Premier League and American Airlines spotlights, is FC Barcelona’s single largest EMV-driver with $346.2M EMV—more than some brands get in a year. Generally, Romano garnered viral attention by reporting on, or breaking, huge stories in the world of soccer, all accompanied by his signature “here we go” catchphrase. Transfer news, particularly Marcus Rashford’s loan to FC Barcelona, tended to have the highest impact (understandably).

Meanwhile, on the pitch, the two narratives that generated the highest output of creator and athlete content were the El Clásico matchup and FC Barcelona’s La Liga title win. The club’s top 30 posts by EMV were almost exclusively Facebook videos featuring highlights from these games, along with reaction content and memes. What’s more, the La Liga title win was further amplified by Barça’s women’s team also winning its league championship, providing yet another triumph for the club’s community to crow over. Go check on any Real Madrid fans in your life, and tell them HBBIP wishes them the best.

2. Oh Wait, Here’s Another Equally Iconic Trio

In assessing FC Barcelona’s content spread, it’s clear that three distinct post formats found enormous audiences, shedding light on how soccer discourse on social media is evolving.

The first archetype is the reaction-and-rivalry format, epitomized by the account ‘bodyanimation’ and its nearly identical peers. The premise is simple: animated body language segments, always framed along the lines of one rival fanbase reacting to the other's pain or joy. By engaging both sides of a rivalry simultaneously, this format encourages broad sharing, and has rocketed up Facebook’s algorithm as one of the most popular content trends in soccer.

The second archetype is sideline and training access content, led by the account Más Que Pelotas. These types of posts read as more of an insider, behind-the-scenes feed: Hansi Flick showing affection to Lamine Yamal after a match; the conversation between Flick and substituted Egyptian midfielder Hamza Abdelkarim; Flick leaving club offices after signing his contract extension; Rodri receiving an ovation at the Spotify Camp Nou; the team's celebration dynamics after the league title. This is content that only exists if you have an embedded presence within the team. It’s clear that FC Barcelona’s fanbase craves this type of access, as during the time period monitored Más Que Pelotas generated more leaderboard EMV than ESPN FC, La Liga, 433, and Marca combined.

The third format is graphic art and wallpaper, led by accounts like Carpetas Blaugranas, which produces mobile wallpapers, player graphic edits, and visual cards featuring the FC Barcelona squad. Rather than highlight clips or video reactions, these accounts trade in designed image assets: starting XI graphics, visualized player rankings, Lamine Yamal edit cards. The format is inherently shareable across every messaging platform and fan group chats, which explains its disproportionate Facebook performance.

3. Another Trio Transforming Global Soccer Discourse

I guess the rule of three is the name of the game today. Because beneath the top-line numbers, three stories are shaping what FC Barcelona's creator community looks like, and where soccer is heading next.

First is a significant geographic signal from the Arabic-language community. Individual Arabic creators and fan accounts are showing some of the most pronounced growth across FC Barcelona’s global data, suggesting a broader structural shift from media consumption to community participation. Several of the fastest-growing Arabic-language accounts show 3,000%–5,000%+ YoY growth, consistent with a creator class building some serious clout.

Meanwhile, women's football had one of the clearest breakout performances in the dataset. FCB Femení ($29.4M EMV, +45% YoY) is the anchor of this cohort, but the surrounding ecosystem grew dramatically: 433womenfc ($9M EMV, +1.9k% YoY), María PC ($10.6M EMV, +14.6k% YoY), and LaMasiaFC ($8.6M EMV, new) all entered or expanded around FC Barcelona's women's team, which won the 2026 UEFA Women's Champions League, providing further momentum for this space ahead of 2027’s Women’s World Cup.

Finally, we get to individual team dynamics, the sort reported on by Romano and others. The two biggest stories for FC Barcelona over the past year were Robert Lewandowski’s departure and Marcus Rashford’s arrival. This changing of the guard also transferred (get it?) to social media, with Lewandowski’s EMV for FC Barcelona declining 50% YoY to $25.1M EMV, while Rashford’s rose 171% YoY to $9.8M EMV. With an English-speaking, Premier League-certified star now available for a historic club, expect even more earned media opportunities for Rashford and FC Barcelona in the near future.

*All data, unless otherwise specified, stems from CreatorIQ's public-facing brand leaderboards. We will never share performance metrics from a customer's CreatorIQ profile, or any brand's private information.

To get all of these stories, plus much more, delivered to your inbox weekly, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter.