Work on the new Santiago Bernabéu, at full pace until September

Renovation work on the Santiago Bernabéu continue and this summer, despite forecasts of extreme high temperatures in the Spanish capital, it is hoped that headway can be made with everything in place for the for the stadium’s reopening, which has been pencilled in for 14 December, its official birthday (although there is still no official word from the club).

As in the last couple of years, since the reform work began, Real Madrid have asked LaLiga if they can play the first three days of the new season away from home to give the construction company more margin to meet its summer deadlines. Once the new campaign is underway, obviously there will be less opportunities make progress on the new stadium. Much of the work is marked by the need to assemble and dismantle machinery and scaffolding so that the public can enter for Madrid’s home games.

The draw for the 2023/24 LaLiga fixtures calendar will be made on Thursday 22 June, and Madrid already know that, whatever happens, they will be away from home in Weeks 1 to 3. In previous seasons, the request also allowed them to take advantage of the September international break, effectively giving them more time to focus on the stadium. It meant that the club had no games at all at the Bernabéu until mid-September.

That won’t be the case this time however. The 2023/24 LaLiga season kicks off on the weekend of 11 August, which means that Madrid will be away from home on that weekend, and the following two (August 18, 19 and 20 and August 25, 26 and 27) - but not the fourth, the weekend of September 1, 2 and 3. Immediately after the Week 4 fixtures, LaLiga will be on hold for the international break, with Euro 2024 qualifiers taking place from 7-12 September.

But this at least gives Madrid a margin of more than two full months to crack on what parts remain to finished. Originally, the delivery date was set for October 2022, but those forecasts were very optimistic, and even more so considering the unforeseen difficulties they’ve faced. First, the Covid pandemic, with the economic and labor setbacks that came with it, and then, to the war in Ukraine, which has restricted access to raw materials and made them much more expensive, especially steel, as Ukraine is one of the world’s main producers of the alloy.

The Bernabéu hypogeum

While the stadium was being covered with the steel slats (which have turned out to be too far apart for the club’s taste; they are being rectified to shorten the space between them), the retractable roof has been positioned and can now be closed. That will help to prevent extreme weather from affecting the development of what is happening inside.

And not just football - Madrid’s idea is for the Bernabéu to end up becoming the epicenter of major events in Madrid, displacing venues such as IFEMA, the Wizink Center or the Palacio de Vistalegre from that position. According to their plans, they want to reach 300 days of occupation of the stadium per year. Today, it was confirmed that the new Bernabeu will be one of the stop-offs on Taylor Swift’s world tour - she will appear in the Spanish capital on 30 May 2024.

Below ground, the function which the hypogeum will perform is fundamental - that is, the subsoil that is being created to temporarily store the Bernabéu pitch, which is retracted so that the stadium can host multiple different events without affecting the playing surface.

This is an extra part of the reform with an estimated cost of a further 225 million euros - on top of the initial outlay of almost 600 million euros. The club will start paying off the loan which it took out to finance the remodelling the Bernabéu this summer, at a rate of 29.5 million euros per year until 2049.