Qatar’s national carrier has released a new, rather unorthodox in-flight safety video that features famous athletes from Spanish football club FC Barcelona.

The four-minute Qatar Airways video takes passengers through the basic safety steps such as buckling up, finding emergency exits and not smoking onboard the aircraft.

But it is set inside a stadium, a bus, a locker room and anywhere else that’s not an airplane.

In a statement, the airline’s CEO Akbar Al Baker explained that as a “young company,” the carrier strives to “stay fresh, relevant and to have fun.”

Marketing representative Salam Al Shawa added:

“We took into account our passengers’ experience with standard safety videos, how important it is to be informed, and so we designed the video to be engaging as well as informative.

By leveraging our strategic partnership with FC Barcelona and taking our passengers to the Camp Nou Stadium, we’ve brought to life our brand promise of ‘Going Places Together’ while enhancing our passengers’ on-board experience.”

Plans to release a new safety video were announced earlier this month during a visit by senior airline officials to New York.

At the time, Qatar Airways also unveiled its new branding campaign, called “Going Places Together.”

Barcelona

The video features six Barca members: Lionel Messi, Luis Suarez, Neymar da Silva Santos Jr., Gerard Piqué, Ivan Rakitic and Javier Mascherano.

The athletes are shown performing the “brace position” on a football pitch, buckling up while sitting in the stands and getting red carded for smoking in an airplane laboratory.

Meanwhile, as Piqué walks out of airport, several oxygen masks drop down to a gaggle of breathless fans, mostly women.

Barcelona’s team also headlines in the airline’s new video announcing its upcoming onboard WiFi services.

The team has had Qatar Airways’ name on its jerseys since 2013, as part of a controversial five-year contract with Qatar Sports Investment that began in 2011.

For the first two years of that agreement, Barca sported Qatar Foundation’s logo on its shirts, its first corporate sponsor in its more than 100-year history.

The current contract is set to expire at the end of the 2015-2016 season, but negotiations stalled earlier this year over the price tag of the new deal.

An airline spokesman told Doha News today that the safety video will play at least until the end of this season.

However, there is no update yet on whether Qatar Airways and Barcelona will continue their partnership after that.

Thoughts?