The Bernabéu will convert its retractable grass into clay courts for training at the Mutua Madrid Open 2026. The move is possible thanks to the engineering of the stadium renovation, which has invested more than 1.3 billion euros, and the gap in events left by Real Madrid’s calendar. It is also the latest expression of an ambition that has been colliding with neighbors and noise limits for years.
What’s going to happen? From April 23 to 30, the Santiago Bernabéu will stop being a soccer field and become several clay courts. The best tennis players on the circuit (among others, Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner, Aryna Sabalenka and Iga Swiatek) will train at the Real Madrid stadium during the first week of competition of the Mutua Madrid Open 2026, which begins on April 20 at the Caja Mágica. The Bernabéu will be a minute’s drive from the players’ hotel. The information, advanced by The New York Timesmarks the arrival at the stadium of a sport that Florentino Pérez has been fooling around with for years.
How to do it. All this is possible thanks to retractable pitch system installed during the remodeling of the stadium, completed at the end of 2023. The field is divided into six trays measuring 107 by 11.67 meters, each weighing approximately 1,500 tons, which are moved by 24 transport carts and stored in the hypogeum: a 30-meter-deep underground greenhouse equipped with growth lamps and air conditioning systems that keep the grass in optimal condition.
The entire process takes approximately six hours. Once the grass is stored, the concrete base is free to install any other surface, such as clay for tennis. It is the same mechanism that allowed us to host the first NFL game in Spain last November.
1.1 billion does not pay for itself. The conversion into a multifunctional stadium is not Florentino’s whim, although he tries to sell us that it has always been a personal dream, as we explain below. The renovation of the Bernabéu has cost, after chaining up to three loans, around 1,100 million euros. Football is not enough. Real Madrid plays around twenty home games per season, which leaves the stadium empty more than three hundred days a year.
The strategy is to fill those days with events that generate additional income, following the model already practiced by facilities such as SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles or Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London. The club surpassed €1.2 billion in annual revenue in 2023-24 in part thanks to this diversification. AND as we counted at the timethe large Spanish stadiums are looking for new sources of income: Athletic is studying options with San Mamés, Betis is working on Villamarín, Barcelona has just invested 1,450 million in the Camp Nou. They all look for the same thing: that the business does not depend on those 19 or 20 game nights a year.
Dreaming since 2019. In the general assembly of Real Madrid that yearthe club president explained that injuries had frustrated several attempts to organize an exhibition match between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer at the Bernabéu. Pérez had been thinking about the idea for some time. Federer retired in 2022, Nadal in 2024, and the match never came.
But the link with tennis remains intact: Nadal has declared on several occasions his desire to preside over the club one dayand Alcaraz, number one in the world, is a declared Madrid fan. The first team players frequently appear in the boxes of the Caja Mágica during the tournament. That the Bernabéu now hosts the training of the circuit’s great figures is, at least, the modest and executable version of that effort by Florentino Pérez that was never fulfilled.
Previous setbacksand how to solve them. The plan to turn the Bernabéu into an events machine has had a serious setback: the concerts. Since the inauguration of the stadium as a music venue in April 2024, the residents of Chamartín complaints about noise levels accumulated which sometimes exceeded 85 decibels, when the municipal ordinance establishes a maximum of 53. The City Council processed sanctions for a total of 2.6 million euros between April and December 2024.
In September 2024, Real Madrid suspended the concerts scheduled until early 2025, and the complaint by the Association of People Injured by the Bernabéu is still ongoing. The situation ended up expelling artists like AitanaLola Índigo or Dellafuente from the stadium. On the other hand, tennis training does not generate this problem: a group of tennis players training in a stadium without 80,000 attendees in the surrounding streets is, acoustically, an activity of another category. For the club, it is also a way to demonstrate that diversification is possible without raising eyebrows.
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