Revealed: Real Madrid's plans to move from the Bernabeu to a theme park
Suraj Radia
- Updated: 23 May 2023 08:55 CDT
- 3 min read
The Santiago Bernabéu is one of football’s most iconic stadiums but Real Madrid could have instead been playing their home games in the middle of a theme park, a new book has revealed.
The plan to build ‘RealMadridLand’ was detailed by Jonathan Clegg and Joshua Robinson, who explained how club president Florentino Perez discussed the idea with a group of former Disney executives, led by long-time CEO Michael Eisner.
The book, entitled ‘Messi vs Ronaldo’, claimed that Perez had even drawn up sketches for rollercoasters that would follow the trajectory of iconic goals scored by the club, such as Zinedine Zidane’s volley that won Real the 2002 Champions League final.
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Perez is believed to have pursued the idea in the 2017/18 season in order to build new revenue streams to compete with state-owned clubs such as Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain.
However, the plan fell apart because Eisner and his team would need 75% more than the €1.4 billion budget Perez had secured, such was the scale of the ambitious plan.
“In our world, we are as big as Disney,” Perez said, according to one of the book’s sources who had been present. “Real Madrid must do things like this because we are the number-one club, and the only way we will remain there is by always being the first big innovator.”
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The idea initially came about after Perez had seen the club’s wage bill jump 32% in 2017, while the agents of players such as Cristiano Ronaldo had insisted that PSG and City could pay the salary that Real couldn’t.
Realising the need for something drastic, Perez believed a theme park would generate the same buzz as signing a ‘Galactico’ and that moving out of their Bernabeu home would be seen as a necessary evolution.
Perez had even discussed the prospect as far back as 2004 when he licensing the club’s rights to a resort in the United Arab Emirates but believed RealMadridLand would have essentially served as a new multi-purpose headquarters for the club.
However, while Eisner and his advisors were impressed by the scale of the project, they were unconvinced at the feasibility of it.
Concerns were also raised about the club’s training ground also being in the middle of the theme park, potentially allowing rival clubs to monitor Real’s tactical plans, a notion which Perez dismissed because ‘people see all that stuff anyway.’
The project eventually died out after it was established that they would need a site closer to 250-acres, costing around €2.5bn, compared to the €1.4bn in funding and the 130-acre plot Perez had initially secured.
