Spanish LaLiga football club Barcelona has continued its original content drive through its new Barça Studios division by announcing the launch of its first animated series.
The Talent Explorers series is being produced in collaboration with Sony Music Latin Iberia, with whom the club signed a strategic agreement in August to create unique entertainment experiences and promote ideas that connect music and sport.
The first season of Talent Explorers will be delivered in two formats, with 11-minute episodes to be shown by conventional platforms and broadcasters, and two-minute episodes to be distributed on digital channels like YouTube. Barcelona said the first episodes should be premiered before the summer of 2021.
Talent Explorers is aimed at a family audience, specifically children aged between five and nine years old.
Barça Studios has engaged Sony Music Latin Iberia to produce a soundtrack for the series, featuring some of its leading international artists. The first teaser for Talent Explorers has been developed and produced in association with Tomavisión, a Catalan production company; and Maga Animation Studio, an Italian company which specialises in computer animation.
The launch of Talent Explorers follows on from the first season of Matchday, the documentary series that followed the everyday lives of Barcelona’s first team players in the 2018-19 season, which Netflix has just released in Latin America, and the club’s first fictional series, which will be set in La Masia, Barcelona’s famous youth academy.
Dídac Lee, board member responsible for the FC Barcelona digital area, said: “Barça Studios is continuing to consolidate its content catalogue by entering such previously unexplored terrain as fiction and now animation, with this project by Talent Explorers, which consolidates the club’s commitment to creating premium content within its new digital strategy that puts fans at the centre of everything, and with this audiovisual content, we can also reach the youngest fans.
“This objective is also a response to the club’s analysis of the football world and industry in terms of entertainment content, which tend not to focus on youth audiences, but they must also be taken into account because they will be the fans of the future.
“This project also helps Barça Studios grow as an audiovisual content factory, by exploring a new terrain like cartoons. It means the club can create a new Intellectual Property (IP) that is dissociated from the players or from real-life competitions, which often limit the capacity for marketing content.”
Meanwhile, Barcelona has reported that its new OTT platform, Barça TV Plus, is already in the testing phase and, in-line with the announced schedule, will be launched in the final stages of this season.