My family is spending this year in Madrid or, more precisely, three metro stops from Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu stadium. A friend often takes me to matches. The ritual starts with the previa, literally “previous”, but roughly “prematch”, over a seafood feast accompanied by a bottle of cold Albariño in a restaurant near the Bernabéu. Usually I pay about €30 for the cheapest match ticket but, once inside the vast stadium, we try to sneak into better empty seats.
There’s something incongruous about Real Madrid: football’s biggest club plays in a second-tier capital in a struggling, mid-sized country. The team that meets Liverpool in Saturday’s Champions League final has about 280 million followers on social media, estimates KPMG, more than any other sports club bar their rivals Barcelona, and more than all NFL teams in American gridiron football combined.
