Gerard Piqué is 35 years old and has been working for 16 to generate a business empire, in addition to carving out a more than successful career as an elite athlete. He is responsible for an increasingly diversified business portfolio: he owns more than a dozen companies and accumulates up to 14 management positions, according to the data that appears in the Mercantile Registry.
And although sports activity continues to be, according to Piqué himself, his main source of income, he is also very focused on his business activity, in which he is sometimes personally involved, as happened with the Davis Cup.
According to information revealed by EL PERIÓDICO DE ESPAÑA, the transfer to the United States of Tomás Carbonell, vice president of the Spanish Tennis Federation, to the Annual General Assembly of the International Tennis Federation where the change of model of the aforementioned tennis tournament was voted , took place on a plane rented by Kosmos Global Tennis SL, Piqué’s company.
real estate assets
Piqué entered the business world in 2006, when he was still 19 years old and playing for Manchester United. with the constitution of Kerad Project 2006 SLa company dedicated to the management of real estate assets, today chaired by his mother, Montserrat Bernabéu, and in which his brother Marc is director of expansion, as reflected in his Linkedin profile.
Three years later, Pique expands its business horizons with the creation of Kerad Holding, which in subsequent years will act as the parent company for a large part of the footballer’s businesses. In said company he appears as a joint administrator together with his father Joan. The presence of his closest family (with the exception of his partner, Shakira) is a constant in most of his business projects.
Through Kerad Holding, Pique invests in businesses such as Bas Alimentariadedicated to the production and distribution of hamburgers, and Investments BCN Two&Twoa real estate company of which his father is the sole administrator.
In 2013, Pique establishes the Kerad 3 Invest sicav in Madrid. As reported by Valencia Plaza, this sicav concentrated its investments abroad before reconfiguring itself as a limited liability company in 2019, after several years accumulating losses.
From Kerad Games to E-Sports
Two years before setting up his Sicav, the footballer makes the leap to the video game business with the creation of Kerad Games, in 2011. For several years, it was his most mediatic extra-football activity, with the development of three titles that he took pains to promote. However, the company was unsuccessful and closed in 2018. Two years earlier, it had launched a new SL, called E-Sports Media Rights, dedicated to promoting international esports competitions. In a way, it was an evolution: from a title producer to a tournament organizing agency.
The activity linked to videogames allowed him to open many of the business doors that the center has gone through later and forge alliances with personalities such as Ibai Llanos. In 2015, trying to find partners for his video game business, he met Hiroshi Mikitani, the president of Rakuten, the most important online store in Japan, on a trip to Tokyo.
Months later, Barcelona took advantage of that relationship. Piqué and his wife, Shakira, organized a dinner in San Francisco with Mikitani and the then president of the Barça club, Josep María Bartomeu, which ended up leading to a sponsorship agreement for which Barça received 55 million euros per year between 2017 and 2022 All parties wanted to make it clear then that Piqué had not charged any type of commission for this contract.
Rakuten was also going to be key in Piqué’s great business project, the remodeling of the Davis Cup format. A great tennis fan, since 2014 he has worked together with a group of collaborators with the idea of organizing a World Cup, an approach that was redirected, after multiple meetings with players and leaders, in the restructuring of the historic annual national team competition.
To launch this new line of business, Piqué founded in June 2016 the company Kosmos Global Tennis SL. And this is where Rakuten appears again, given that the Japanese company agrees to an investment of 3,000 million dollars over 25 years to shape the Davis project. Mikitani is also a director of Kosmos: his name is the second that appears on the company’s website, after that of Piqué himself.
The Cosmos Holding
Under the Kosmos brand, the footballer is diversifying his business activity. With that goal, created in November 2017 Kosmos Global Holding SL. As reflected on the company’s website, Kosmos encompasses three business units: Tennis, Studios and Football.
the second one is dedicated to producing audiovisual content. His great presentation to the world was ‘The Decision’, the documentary broadcast by Movistar + in which Antoine Griezmann announced to the world that he rejected FC Barcelona’s offer in 2018 to stay at Atlético de Madrid. Later, he participated in the production of the documentary ‘Matchday’, an ‘inside’ about Barça during the 2018/19 season, owned by the Barça club itself.
Kosmos’ third leg was born at the end of 2018, when Piqué decided to buy FC Andorra. His company took over 56% of the shareholding of the Andorran club, which then competed in the first Catalan regional division. He paid off all his debts and a year later he paid nearly half a million euros to buy the place in Second B (current First RFEF) that Reus left vacant due to his debts. Just a few days ago, Andorra achieved promotion to the Second Division.
The Super Cup
Kosmos Football was also the company that mediated between Saudi Arabia and the RFEF of Luis Rubiales so that the Spanish Super Cup was played in the Saudi dictatorship, charging a millionaire commission for it. He also bought the broadcasting rights in Spain for the French Ligue 1, the Italian Serie B (second division) and last summer’s Copa América.
Kosmos has also entered the world of sports representation, being the German tennis player Alexander Zverev (number 3 in the world ranking and Olympic gold medalist in Tokyo) its first client.
Piqué’s last appointment in the Mercantile Registry, on March 22, is as director of LaLiga Entertainment SL, a ‘joint venture’ formed by LaLiga, Port Aventura and Kosmos for the development and commercial exploitation of theme parks.
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And how much money has Piqué earned with all these businesses? It is not possible to provide an exact figure. The most reliable reference (if it can be called that) was the one he himself offered in An interview on the Movistar+ program ‘La Resistencia’.
Asked how much money he had, a classic ‘late night’ question, the footballer assured that “in assets” he had more than Espanyol’s budget for that season, 2018-19. According to the accounts presented by the Catalan club, that year their income forecast rose to 95 million euros.