BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Barcelona's next Champions League match at home will be at the renovated Camp Nou stadium with partial capacity.
The club said Wednesday it will host Eintracht Frankfurt at the venue on Dec. 9 in the league phase of the European competition. About 45,000 tickets are expected to be available.
Barcelona said UEFA accepted the team’s request to return to the Camp Nou, “considering that all necessary requirements have been met.” The club needed an exemption from European soccer's governing body as regulations state that teams must use the same stadium for all four home games in the league phase.
“Barcelona is pleased to be able to compete again at its stadium and to continue advancing in the comprehensive transformation project of the new Spotify Camp Nou,” the club said.
On Monday, Barcelona announced its Spanish league game against Athletic Bilbao, on Saturday, will be its first at the Camp Nou since it began upgrading the stadium in June 2023 to expand capacity in Europe’s largest soccer venue from 99,000 to 105,000. Only 45,401 fans will be allowed in against Athletic.
More than 20,000 fans paid to watch the team practice at the Camp Nou on Nov. 7.
The highly indebted club secured 1.45 billion euros (then $1.6 billion) from multiple investors to undertake the project.
Barcelona had originally planned to be back playing at the venue as early as November 2024 to coincide with the club’s 125th anniversary. The team has played at the municipally owned 55,000-seat Olympic Stadium since the start of the 2023-24 season.
Another delay this summer led to the club scrambling to hold a Spanish league game at the 6,000-seat stadium located on its training grounds on the outskirts of the city in September.
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FILE - A Spanish La Liga soccer match is played between Barcelona and Las Palmas at the Camp Nou stadium in Barcelona, Spain, on Oct. 1, 2017. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez, File)
Barcelona's players exercise during the team's first training session at the venue after its renovation at the Camp Nou stadium in Barcelona, Spain, Friday, Nov. 7, 2025. (AP Photo/Joan Monfort)
CAIRO (AP) — Iranians began to regain internet access on Wednesday after authorities ended a monthslong shutdown. But users said service was slow and spotty in some areas, with apps like YouTube and Instagram heavily restricted, as they were before the cutoff began during nationwide protests in January.
Authorities justified the outage as a military imperative after the United States and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28. Their decision to lift some restrictions this week came as negotiators appeared to be closing in on a more permanent truce. But many Iranians feared access could be cut off again at a moment's notice.
Internet tracking company Netblocks said Iran’s connectivity, which measures the ability of devices to connect to the internet, is at around 86% of capacity from before the cutoff. Internet analysis firm Kentik said internet traffic, which measures the amount of data transferred and is a good illustration of usage, was at around 40%.
Amir Rashidi, an Iranian cybersecurity analyst, said there were still widespread disruptions. “It's too early to say the shutdown is over,” he wrote on X.
Iran’s roughly 90 million people have been cut off from the internet for most of 2026, one of the world’s longest and strictest national shutdowns. Young people with online careers saw their incomes evaporate. Job losses and the closure of online businesses added to the war's steep economic costs.
The cutoff made it difficult for Iranian families to communicate through months of unrest and war. At some points, phone lines were also cut off, though they were later restored.
A woman living in Tehran said that for months she was barely able to speak to her sons living abroad. She couldn't believe authorities had restored access, saying she had assumed they would find some justification to prolong the outage.
A taxi driver said service was restored but weak. He expressed hope it would improve so he could use messaging apps with family and friends. Both spoke on condition of anonymity for security reasons.
Prices spiked during the shutdown, with residents in Tehran at times paying around $7.50 per gigabyte. Prices are back down to around $2.25 for 30 gigabytes, roughly where they were before the protests.
Even then, Iran tightly controlled access to popular social media sites, leading many to rely on virtual private networks, or VPNs. The cost of those workarounds soared during the shutdown, making them unaffordable for many as the economy was battered.
Businesses have started reappearing online, announcing their return with posts on sites like Instagram and Telegram.
A gamer and tech influencer in the central city of Isfahan said the shutdown had caused him to lose a lot of his audience on YouTube and Instagram, where he had spent years building up a large following.
“All my views and interactions are way down. I’ve been erased from the algorithm,” he said in a voice note sent by WhatsApp, adding that his internet connection was still slower than before the shutdown.
“The situation is such that many content producers have had their income reduced to zero, have moved on to other jobs, or have been forced to sell their equipment to survive,” he said. He spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
Iranian authorities first shut down the internet in January during mass anti-government protests that were eventually stamped out in a violent crackdown. Thousands of people were killed and tens of thousands detained.
That cutoff was just starting to ease when the government imposed a complete internet blackout after the start of the war, when U.S. and Israeli strikes killed Iran's supreme leader and other top officials.
The government faced criticism for the prolonged shutdown, which caused even more harm to an economy devastated by inflation, strikes on key industries and a U.S. blockade on Iranian ports.
The internet cutoff cost an estimated $30-40 million daily, with indirect losses likely twice that much, a member of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, Afshin Kolahi, told a local newspaper last month. About 10 million people have jobs that depend on internet connectivity, according to Communications Minister Sattar Hashemi.
Iranians still had access to a national net, but that has a far narrower reach, and users complained of poor service and heavy censorship. Senior government officials are given SIM cards granting them access to the global internet. Under pressure, the government expanded access to the SIM cards to some professions during the shutdown.
A woman checks her smartphone while sitting on a bench along a sidewalk in northern Tehran, Iran, Tuesday, May 26, 2026. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)
