This afternoon the President of the Government of Catalonia, Artur Mas, was at the Maracaná futbol stadium, as part of his institutional trip to Brazil which also included various other social and business initiatives taking place in Rio de Janeiro

 

The Chief Executive visited the sports facilities together with representatives of the Catalan company Royalverd, responsible for the plantation and maintenance of the pitch.

 

Royalverd is a family run business from Les Preses (Olot), dedicated to sports gardening with extensive experience in planting grass on football fields both in Spain and abroad.

 

At the beginning of 2012, the company received strategic assessment by the Centre for Business Promotion and ACC1Ó in São Paulo about the type of agreements to be made with a more favourable local partner, better suited to the future plans of the company in Brasil. Finally Royaverd closed a joint venture deal with Greenleaf, a Brazilian company based in Rio de Janeiro, investing more than a million euros in the operations.

 

RoyalVerd and Greenleaf were responsible for the management and the maintenance for the six pitches used in the 2013 Confederations Cup in Brazil which took place in June: Maracaná (Rio de Janeiro), Mineirao (Belo Horizonte), Nacional (Brasília), Castelao (Fortaleza), Arena Fonte Nova (Salvador de Bahia) and Arena Pernambuco (Recife). Furthermore, the bids for practically all the stadiums used in the 2014 World Cup were won by the Catalan-Brazilian partnership.

 

In terms of the most representative of these, the Maracaná Stadium: it was inaugurated with the celebration of the World Cup in Brazil in 1950 and underwent a complete remodelling for the Confederations Cup and the upcoming World Cup in 2014. The Maracaná will host both of the finals in these two competitions.

 

In this sense, RoyalVerd has introduced Brazilian football to the high quality engineering of European pitches, with a trimmer and faster surface. This is the first time that there has been a production on a large scale of extensive clods of grass.

 

In June 2013, RoyalVerd was awarded for its investment in Brazil by the Sports Federations of Catalonia Union and by Indescat, the sports industry Cluster. In 2011 the company’s billing was near 3,7 million euros. In 2013, the total billings are estimated to rise to 12 million euros.