The soccer club—the world’s most valued and one of the last sports teams in the world owned by 99,781 members rather than a private owner—had spent more than six years and $1.91 billion renovating the legendary Santiago Bernabéu soccer cathedral into a 82,000-spectator venue. It was redesigned to host soccer matches or any other imaginable event, from music concerts to conventions, thanks to a feat of mechanical engineering that swaps out its perfect but fragile natural grass pitch for a solid concrete ground at the push of a button.

Designed by L35 Arquitectos, gmp Architekten, and Ribas & Ribas Arquitectos after an international competition in 2014, the new Bernabéu’s was reimagined with two objectives in mind. The first was to “humanize this macrostructure,” according to Tristán López-Chicheri, CEO of L35 Architects. López-Chicheri thinks that its new shape—which will eventually display live Real Madrid’s games to outsiders using LED projection—provides “a flexible and recognizable identity while reflecting the city’s activity through its reflective surfaces.” The façade, he says, enhances its aesthetic appeal and improves the natural ventilation thanks to the parametrized steel louvers that surround it.

The second objective, and most important for Real Madrid’s fortunes, was to transcend hosting soccer to become a multifunctional space. The renovation had to include a fully retractable roof to, primarily, provide protection from the elements, but also multiply the roaring of the fans to intimidate visiting teams. The movable translucent roof is supported by two massive steel trusses that span 577 feet across the stadium—which was constructed using 800-tonne cranes—perched on four new towers built on deep foundations. The roof enhances the spectator experience with an impressive 360-degree LED screen and the latest tech in lighting and sound systems. In total, the construction crews used 33,000 tonnes of steel to refurbish the stadium, the equivalent of 120 Airbus A380s. 

The system takes approximately 25 minutes to fully retract or reinstall the grass surface. The system’s electric motors and hydraulic lifts work in tandem to move the pitch sections smoothly along the rails. This operation is essential for minimizing downtime between events and ensuring the stadium can be swiftly adapted for different uses.

Destruction of the city spirit

The system works great. It is actually impressive to see it in action. Which brings us back to Taylor Swift and the parade of musicians who have been playing multiple days every week since she inaugurated the Santiagos Bernabéu’s new multifunctional life with her global Eras tour. 

The Bernabéu’s neighbors are used to the team’s games. They don’t happen often: Real Madrid plays one LaLiga match—Spain’s top soccer competition—on weekends every other week, on Saturday, Sunday, or Monday. Then there’s the occasional midweek game for the two other tournaments the team plays: The European Champions League and the other national tournament, the Copa del Rey. The games’ noise is acceptable. You can only hear the fans screaming the goals, the announcer introducing the players, or the near-misses. Fans—who are not rowdy but regular Joes and Janes—arrive about an hour before the kickoff. The games lasts for about two hours—including the half-time break—and then they all are gone about 40 minutes after all is over.

But from the day Swift performed, it was clear that the relative tranquility of soccer games was not going to be the norm for concerts. Everyone who lived in a one mile radius around the stadium realized that their worst fears had become a reality. That includes me: I live 1,700 feet from the Santiago Bernabéu, with only a small church in between the stadium and my apartment building. I could clearly hear the sound testing during the day. When the night came, the noise became unbearable, reaching 80 decibels until about 1 a.m., way over the 53 dB permitted by city ordinances. Local police’s phones were on fire as neighbors called to complain.

The noise only grew after those two first concerts. Following Taylor Swift’s performances at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium in May, Argentine rapper Duki performed in June. In July, the stadium hosted a series of concerts by Colombian reggaeton star Karol G, who performed four shows in four days. Those two acts increased the number of decibels, exceeding the 90db mark measured from the apartments right next to the stadium. That is as loud as a hairdryer or a powertool near your head, enough to physically rattle all glass windows around the venue.

The deafening noise is not the only problem. Days before the event, you can see massive fleets of logistic trucks and buses parked all over the wide avenues and streets surrounding the venue. This wreaks havoc that extends way beyond the neighborhood, rippling all over the city’s streets: The stadium is located right on Paseo de la Castellana—a wide avenue that is Madrid’s biggest traffic artery, traversing the city north to south—in the heart of the Chamartín neighborhood, which may be the equivalent to New York’s Upper East Side.

Beyond the traffic nightmare, the flow of people is the other major source of pain for the neighbors. These concerts bring a lot more than 80,000 music fans into the neighborhood. Thousands come without a ticket, just to hang out with others and to try to catch a glance at their favorite star entering the stadium’s parking in their limos. And the Swifties were relatively civil. Duki and Karol G’s fans were more rowdy. Drunken visitors trashed “el barrio” with each concert, peeing in public, dropping trash, and destroying plants and urban furniture—regardless of the police controls or the municipal cleaning crews that attempt to mitigate the damage. At one point, a 42-year-old man was beaten to death by a young fan. Needless to say, everyone around the stadium is desperate for a solution to this chaos.

A disaster foretold

Desperate to save its multifunctional cash cow plan, Real Madrid has asked the neighbors to be patient about the problem. The City Council and the club now say they have a plan: Lowering the power of the sound system and limiting the number of concerts to “20 extraordinary events.” The club is promising they are working to design and install sound suppression systems to lower the noise level, but experts are skeptical about its ability to do that in a venue that, by law, has to be open to the street to allow for ventilation. Most neighbors, myself included, can’t understand how sound mitigation was not implemented in the first place, since the objective was to turn the Santiago Bernabéu into this type of venue.

This was the chronicle of an urban disaster foretold. Everyone feared this was going to happen, yet nobody, including the many fans who live around the stadium, can understand how Real Madrid has made so many mistakes and planned so poorly. Keep in mind that Real Madrid is not only the most valuable soccer team on the planet, but also one of the most powerful institutions in Europe. And Florentino Pérez—the club’s president and also Chairman and majority stake owner of ACS Group, one of the biggest civil engineering companies in Europe—is perhaps the most powerful person in Spain after the President. Which seems to be why Madrid’s Mayor José Luis Martínez-Almeida is trying to walk a fine line between keeping him and the neighbors happy.