2023-09-27 13:45:54
BarcelonaThe new Santiago Bernabéu, which is to be inaugurated this December, was supposed to be the jewel in Florentino Pérez’s crown. His main legacy, beyond the Leagues and Champions that Real Madrid has won during his term as president. A media coup that he designed in 2011, a time when Barça was setting the pace of world football with Leo Messi and Pep Guardiola. The revolutionary project ran into several obstacles and had to wait until 2019 to start construction. Four years later, the works are almost finished. But, far from getting over it, a notable part of the club’s surroundings have put their hands to their heads when they saw the result. Starting with the price, which has quadrupled since the initial projection, now a decade ago. And ending with the facade, which looks quite far from what they showed renders before the start of work. The virtual projections predicted a stadium covered entirely in aluminum, closed and shiny. At the time of truth, half of the slats were missing, and the interior lighting, visible from the street, has given rise to all sorts of jokes, comparing the white coliseum to a large shopping centre.
A retractable roof, new and renovated VIP seats, a commercial and restaurant area and the possibility of removing the grass thanks to an engineering system to be able to host multitudinous concerts. Here are some of the highlights of the new stadium. But, in the eyes of the spectators, all these details are camouflaged by the controversy that has generated the lining of the Bernabéu. The networks have echoed it: “Sardine can”, “Wicker basket”, “Snake in a fridge” or “Giant hyperheart” are some of the memes that have gone viral the most. “In a project like this, monumental, the visualizations of the project become public and that ends up becoming the collective imagination. The mistake is to believe that the render it’s the reality, when it’s simply a sales element of the project,” points out Pep Quílez, member of the board of the Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya (COAC).
Far from being a headache, the pandemic made it possible to speed up the works: the team moved to play without an audience in the sports city while the operators did and dismantled inside the stadium. But the war in Ukraine did mean a hard blow, especially for the roof, made of aluminum, since many of the materials were blocked or became more expensive due to the war conflict. “In any project, a deviation from the budget can be assumed, but in a millionaire project, a cost overrun means an unaffordable amount of money. This explains that the work has had to be touched up and modified following the increase in the price of materials,” he analyzes Quilez. The whole thing was supposed to cost around 200 million euros, as the president said back in 2011. At the time, there was only a sketch of the project. The latest figure puts the cost at close to 900 million, an amount that includes an increase of 225 million while the remodeling was being done. Extra money that Florentino got through a loan approved by the trustees’ assembly.
In Barcelona, where just this summer the remodeling works of the Spotify Camp Nou began, they speak cautiously of the Bernabéu, aware that they can get their fingers stuck. “Most of the jokes have been made through aerial images, but the experience of spectators who go to the stadium on foot and have to look up to see the structure is very different,” says one source linked to Espai Barça. A similar opinion to that of Quílez: “On the level of texturing, overall, the approximation has been quite good, but the lighting elements have changed and people have noticed that.”
In Madrid they take it for granted that some of the problems with the new Bernabéu will be solved
From Real Madrid they have chosen to remain silent, although from the environment of the club they assume that most of these problems will be solved very soon. That some slats will be changed that are smaller than what was projected and that some that are installed in a horizontal position will become vertical. With these small tweaks, they explain, the new Bernabéu should look a lot more like the ones renders of what it resembles right now.
But the exterior has not been the only point of criticism. At the premiere of the new stadium in a Champions League match, the German Union Berlin complained through their official account that there were problems with the wifi. At the same time, according to the Cope chain, numerous season ticket members have complained that the capacity has been increased in exchange for reducing the space between the seats. Thus, there are more seats per row, the armrests of some armchairs have been removed which gave more comfort in the noble tribune area and there is also less distance with the seats in front. These problems and the leaks that appeared during the storms that Madrid suffered in the summer have put Florentino’s great personal project under suspicion. There are two months left until the official opening.
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