SOCCER:BARCELONA WILL be paid to carry a sponsor on their shirt – for the first time in their 111-year history. A deal with the Qatar Foundation will earn the Catalan club €30m a year until 2016, with bonuses payable according to success on the field.

The €150m deal will be the biggest shirt sponsorship deal in football history and is worth double the €15m a season earned by Real Madrid from the bookmakers Bwin. The battle now will be to find a space for Barcelona’s new sponsor alongside Unicef, whose name already occupies the front of the shirt.

The Barcelona vice-president, Javier Faus, described the deal as the “biggest in the history of football – and at a time of economic crisis, too”.

Attempting to shift the blame to the previous administration for a decision that has provoked mixed emotions and some criticism, Faus said the deal “would not have been signed if it were not for the debt which, as we have said before, is between €420m and €430m”.

The current board took over the club on July 1st when Sandro Rosell won the presidential elections. Rosell’s former partner and now sworn enemy Joan Laporta’s mandate had come to an end after seven years in charge.

The Qatar Foundation is a non-profit organisation dependent on the Qatari state and dedicated to the educational and technological development of the country. “We are talking about a non-commercial organisation, a charity from a country that wants to make itself known through education and sport – one that, as you know, will host the 2022 World Cup,” Faus said.

The deal reinforces Qatar’s connections with the club. Barca’s coach, Pep Guardiola, was an ambassador for Qatar’s 2022 World Cup bid. Negotiations began last August.

The question now is where on the shirt the Qatar Foundation will appear. The club say the idea at first is to use the two sponsors together but, after this year, Unicef will not have preference; perhaps while Qatar appears on the shirt, Unicef will be on the shorts.

Faus said there is not yet an official logo for the Qatar Foundation. “The marketing departments of the club and Nike [Barcelona’s shirt supplier] are looking at a way of combining it with Unicef,” he said.

Unicef was the first name ever to appear on Barcelona’s blue and red shirts when a deal was signed in 2004. Unlike traditional sponsorship deals, Barcelona pay Unicef €1.5m a year towards Aids projects in order to carry its name on the shirt.