Rakuten Viber unveils 2021 initiatives for FC Barcelona partnership

Rakuten Viber, one of the world’s leading apps for free and easy communication, unveils a series of new initiatives going into the 2020/2021 season for its longtime partnership with FC Barcelona. In addition to launching an official global FC Barcelona Community in Russian, the company plans to publish a special Q&A in the communities with five players in February: Marc-André ter Stegen, Frenkie de Jong, Miralem Pjanic, Sergiño Dest, Clément Lenglet, and Antoine Griezmann.

Viber’s FC Barcelona cooperation kicked off in the 2017/2018 season, and Viber has served as the club’s official channel of communication since. As the football season heats up and we march toward the new decade, Rakuten Viber kicks off a new chapter of its partnership with the club, building a fan-first experience for its users all the way through various touch points on its messaging app. To establish a meaningful connection between players and fans on the app, Viber will offer initiatives including:

• Meet & greet the players - An exclusive Q&A with current FC Barcelona players, in which they answer 5-10 pre-selected questions from fans. Fans have the unique option to send their questions via member-to-member (m2m) messaging in all of the FC Barcelona Viber Communities, and the team chooses the best ones.
• A day with a legend - A unique opportunity for the fans to spend a day with an FC Barcelona legend player in the Community, where he makes a Community takeover in March and the fans can take part in a standard day of his life.
• Vote & win - Viber users are granted a monthly opportunity to win autographed 2020-21 jerseys by predicting the winner of the match , nixing the complicated rules and points systems from the previous seasons and making it simple and easy for the fans to participate
• Some very special giveaways to win for the fans to celebrate the launch of the FC Barcelona community in Russian and the growth of the other Viber communities of the club
• Fan stars - fans will have the opportunity to be the stars of the community every month by sharing their personal story and journey in connection with the club.

In addition to this, a Nepali Viber user, Kamal Pradhan has also won a signed jersey from the official Barcelona club for predicting the correct scores in FC Barcelona's community. Five renowned players from Barcelona; including Pjanic, Pique, Ansu Fati, Sergi Roberto and De Jong have signed the jersey. Out of the many unique features that Viber has on its platform, the poll feature enables users to predict the MVP of FC Barcelona's matches.

Almost 30 thousand Viber users participated in the pool draw, where Kamal Pradhan was the monthly winner for December. Viber users can participate in this poll until June 2021 and predict the correct result of the match in FCB Communities to win this exclusive gift hamper. There are 4 to 8 matches occurring each month and each match is an opportunity to predict the right answer!

The app now offers a global community of the club for the first time in Russian in addition to its global communities in English, Spanish and Arabic, for fans to chat about games and players stats. Viber’s users will also be able to send each other brand new FC Barcelona stickers from the app’s new sticker pack for this season, featuring the player's faces. Unlike last year’s cartoon-based stickers, the new season’s feature a photo of the player’s face. It’s a very special sticker pack, as it features all the players from the new season, too !

“We’re delighted to double down on our fan-first FC Barcelona partnership going into 2021,” says Anna Znamenskaya CGO of Rakuten Viber. “This cooperation has been a success since it began in 2017, and we’re thrilled to bring fans closer to their team’s players through Viber, just as we connect between all of our users.”

Related to the FC Barcelona Russian Community launch, first team player Antoine Griezmann highlighted ‘I’m so happy that we will be a little closer to our Russian fans now’, while Sergiño Dest expressed his satisfaction because ‘from now on, Barça will speak Russian to its fans’.