Inside RCD Espanyol: A Learning Walk Beyond the Game
A football stadium is much more than a matchday venue. It is a strategic asset, a commercial platform, a community hub and a reflection of a club’s identity. For students on ESEI’s Master in Sports Management, a visit to RCD Espanyol de Barcelona brought that reality to life in a way that no classroom could replicate.
Students from the Ecosystems of Sport course, led by Professor Gerard Valldeperez, visited RCD Espanyol for a combined stadium tour and speaker session, exploring how one of Barcelona’s most historic professional football clubs manages its facilities, its fans and its business across every dimension of modern sport.
About RCD Espanyol
RCD Espanyol de Barcelona was founded in 1900 and is one of the founding members of LaLiga. The club plays its home matches at the RCDE Stadium in Cornellà-El Prat, a purpose-built 40,000-capacity venue that opened in 2009 and stands as one of the most modern football stadiums in Spain. Espanyol has a rich history and a passionate supporter base, and its story offers students a compelling case study in how a professional club manages identity, competition, commercial strategy and community connection simultaneously.
The Stadium Tour: Where Live Sport Happens
The visit opened with a guided tour led by Jordi Tomàs Augusto, who gave students access to spaces and perspectives that go well beyond what a matchday ticket provides.
Three interconnected themes structured the visit. The first was performance: how the stadium is designed and managed to create optimal conditions for athletes, from pitch quality, lighting and equipment to emergency planning and medical services. Students saw first-hand the infrastructure that makes elite performance possible and the operational decisions that sit behind every training session and fixture.
The second was venue management: the systems, technology and people required to run a major stadium as an integrated facility. Energy efficiency, security, smart technology, maintenance systems and the coordination of multiple services within a single complex all formed part of the conversation. Students explored how modern stadium management has become as much a technology challenge as an operational one.
The third was fan experience: how the club designs and delivers the matchday and beyond-matchday experience for its supporters. Ticketing systems, food and beverage operations, signage, accessibility planning, entertainment zones, Wi-Fi infrastructure and screen content are all part of how Espanyol builds and sustains its relationship with its fanbase. Understanding how these elements work together to create loyalty, generate revenue and reinforce the club’s identity gave students a complete picture of what a sports venue actually manages.
The Business Strategy Session: Managing a Professional Football Club
The visit was completed with a speaker session by David Bley García, who shared key insights into RCD Espanyol’s business strategy and the wider realities of managing a professional football club at the highest level.
David’s session connected the stadium visit to the broader commercial and strategic picture. Revenue generation, brand positioning, community engagement, digital transformation and international growth were all addressed, alongside the constant challenge of competing both on and off the pitch. For students, hearing a senior professional speak candidly about how these dimensions interact, and where the real strategic tensions lie, was exactly the kind of insight that makes a field visit different from a lecture.
As Professor Valldeperez noted after the visit: “This type of field trip is exactly what the Ecosystems of Sport course is about: understanding sport beyond the game, and analysing how clubs, stadiums, fans, business models and strategic decisions come together to shape the future of the sports industry.”
The Bigger Picture: Sport as a System
The Espanyol visit was the final field trip of the Ecosystems of Sport course, and it brought together many of the themes that have run through the programme. Throughout the course, students visited INEFC Barcelona, CEM Can Felipa, CEM La Mar Bella and SPODEAL, among others, building a comprehensive and varied understanding of how sport functions at every level of the ecosystem.
The RCDE Stadium sits at the top of that ecosystem, where all the threads come together: the performance environment, the operational complexity, the fan relationship, the commercial strategy and the identity of a club that has been part of Barcelona’s sporting life for more than a century.
This is what studying sports management through project-based learning at ESEI looks like in practice.
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