Drake, Barcelona unveil special OVO kits to be worn at El Clasico

Arun Srinivasan
·Contributing Writer
Updated ·2 min read
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After Drake became the first artist to amass 50 billion streams on Spotify, the OVO owl will be featured on Barcelona's jerseys during Sunday's El Clásico. (Photo via AP)
After Drake became the first artist to amass 50 billion streams on Spotify, the OVO owl will be featured on Barcelona's jerseys during Sunday's El Clásico. (Photo via AP)

Drake has been celebrated and made fun of for his rampant sports fandom, but this time the Canadian rap star has truly made sports history.

We had to triple-check the post to confirm we weren’t dreaming, but in the early hours of Friday morning it was revealed that FC Barcelona will be wearing the OVO logo on their kits against Real Madrid on Sunday to celebrate Drake becoming the first artist ever to amass 50 billion streams on spotify.

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If Drake himself didn’t announce this in conjunction with Barcelona on Instagram, we wouldn’t believe it either — he seems to realize the honour is almost too good to be true.

“To celebrate being the first artist with 50 billion streams on Spotify, FC Barcelona will wear the OVO owl at El Clasico on Sunday 😵‍💫 this doesn’t feel real but it is,” he wrote.

To our memory, it’s the first time a club has celebrated the success of a global artist through a one-off venture. But it’s deeper than that.

Barcelona has always presented itself as a sacred brand, and for large stretches, marketed itself as a club that tried to fend off the ills of commercialism. That era has passed, though, as Barcelona famously refused kit sponsors until the early-to-mid 2000s before giving into UNICEF and now SPOTIFY.

To Drake’s credit, his detractors have always teased him about bandwagoning, but getting your logo on the kit one of the most iconic teams in world sports is definitely worth bragging about it. As he said, this doesn’t feel real but it is.

“We were really excited to celebrate one of the biggest games of the year and mark Drake’s milestone as the first artist to reach 50 billion streams. We’ve always said that we want this partnership to be a celebration of fans, players and artist’s on a global stage — and there’s no bigger stage than El Clásico,” Spotify VP of partnerships Marc Hazan wrote in a statement listed on Barcelona’s website.

Let’s call it what it is. We live in a drip or drown world, and Drake chose drip. We want one of these kits so badly — apologies to any Madridistas out there.

Barcelona and Real Madrid are currently tied atop La Liga with identical records of seven wins and one draw, rendering Sunday’s El Clasico as the marquee fixture on the planet. One of these sides is going to look like the future, against Madrid’s standard, iconic all-whites.

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