Barça is more than a club for many reasons but one of the main ones is its commitment to being a multisport club. Barça compete at the top level in five professional sports, and apart from football, all of them call the Palau Blaugrana home. Without the venue, Barça would not be the best multisport club in the world as the basketball, handball, roller hockey and futsal teams have all been able to grow over the years to consolidate their place amongst the elite at domestic and international level.
The arrival of the Palau gave the professional sections a great boost as up to that point they lacked a place to call home and were forced to play their matches in various venues such as the Sol de Baix, the old Zona Esportiva del Club (outdoors), the Picadero, Pista Gran Vía and the Palau d’Esports.
Development of the seating
The boom in the professional sections in the 1980s led to the Palau becoming too small for the most popular, the basketball team, who had to move to Montjuïc to play at the Palau Sant Jordi with room for 17,000 fans. However, the experiment lasted just two years, between 1990 and 1992, with various problems arising such as the big difference in capacity, the distance between the fans and the court and difficulties accessing Montjuïc.
All this meant a return to the Palau for the basketball team and in 1994 at a cost of 157 million pesetas, the venue was extended to take capacity from 5,696 to 7,334 - a figure that became 7,585 after another remodelling in October 2007.
