When the macroconcerts began last April in the renovated Santiago Bernabéu stadium, their neighbors began to realize what awaited them. The noise of the first festivals echoed through their windows from daytime rehearsals until the early hours of the morning, far surpassing the noise generated by the usual football matches, to which they had been accustomed for decades.
“The stadium is part of the neighborhood, not the concert hall. “We neighbors are afraid and worried,” wrote an unknown X account, @RuidoBernabeu, at the time. At the time, he was only three I likeToday, she has more than 10,000 followers and has become the most visible face of a group of residents who are highly motivated by mass concerts, their new source of problems.
The residents of the Bernabéu have been protesting for over a year against what they consider to be favourable treatment by the Community of Madrid and, above all, by the City Council, towards the club chaired by Florentino Pérez. At first, they demonstrated against the construction of two municipal car parks, through a tailor-made competition carried out for Real Madrid, thanks to which they will be able to exploit the two facilities with almost 2,000 parking spaces over the next 45 years. The image of their banners, unusual in one of the capital’s highest-income neighbourhoods, greatly worried the Almeida government, which tried to appease their demands with meetings and some concessions.
But opposition to these parking lots has led to the formation of two neighborhood associations, created to channel their legal demands. They first denounced the city council for the parking competition, which a court has already annulled in the first instance for “lack of public interest.” For the moment, the municipality refuses to comply with the decision and has appealed, so the decision that would cancel these works is not yet final.
Alongside these processes, the macro-concerts arrived and the neighbours, already mobilised through these associations, opened a new judicial path because not all the events organised by the Bernabéu complied, by far, with the limits set by the noise ordinance. . of the Madrid City Council. The Association of the Injured of the Bernabéu filed a complaint for environmental crime against the general director of Real Madrid, José Antonio Sánchez. The first hearing, scheduled for this week, will take place at the end of October.
As lawsuits rain down, Madrid City Council has tried to minimize the consequences of the events that have its approval and that of the Community of Madrid. First, it announced a limit of 20 shows per year at the Bernabéu, not counting football broadcasts, then it limited its programming to eleven o’clock at night. It also repainted the parking spaces in blue, green – another request from the residents – and assured that the Merengue club would carry out soundproofing work to avoid further inconvenience.
But a week ago, it all exploded again: Romeo Santos’ concerts once again recorded noise levels well above what was permitted, although Almeida himself tried to calm things down by assuring that there was no evidence “that there were too many incidents”. But the neighbours already arrived hot at the end of the summer, after illegal noise, a serious gas leak and even a fight with a dead person at the exit of one of Karol G’s concerts.
A turnover of 150 million per year
According to Real Madrid’s calculations, which this newspaper has had access to, the Santiago Bernabéu plans to host 58 events per year in the stadium, more than 30 of which are non-sporting. The stadium’s renovation would quickly be amortized thanks to them, according to the white accounts, also inflated by the operating profits of the future car parks.
In 2022, Florentino Pérez signed an agreement with the events company Legends that would transform the white arena into a veritable goose that lays golden eggs: the contract would bring in a minimum of 150 million euros each year (which he estimates he already obtained by operating the unrenovated Bernabéu) and could represent between 400 and 440 million euros in annual turnover when operating at full capacity, according to what Voz Pópuli published at the time.
To get an idea of what these figures mean at a sporting level, 150 million is approximately what the seven highest paid players at Real Madrid earn together each year (Mbappé, Vinicius, Bellingham and Courtois among them).
But Real Madrid’s accounts are beginning to deteriorate, after the cancellation of five concerts, one of them definitively and four others (Dellafuente, Lola Indigo and two by Aitana) pending rescheduling when the stadium is better soundproofed, which the neighbors believe “impossible” to perform. In the club’s statement announcing its suspension, however, it assures that during the break in concerts it will continue to organize “events and shows.”
“We fear that they will continue to want to organize concerts or festivals. Or that they will give them another name to ambush reality,” laments Inmaculada Ramos, president of another neighborhood platform, the Neighborhood Initiative Association for the Defense of the Environment and Against the Paseo de la Habana-Padre Damián Tunnel. “What we, the neighbors, want is for the events, concerts and festivals at the Santiago Bernabéu to be definitively suspended. “It is a sports stadium in which only sports should take place,” he concludes, summing up a position that does not seem to be changing among the neighborhood’s residents.
