When local residents complained last May of the “unbearable noise” emanating from Real Madrid’s Bernabeu stadium, they risked incurring the wrath of Swifties the world over – because the noise they were grumbling about was that created by Taylor Swift during her two concerts at the venue.
Her afternoon rehearsals caused their own problems too.
“You could hear absolutely everything,” Fr Ildefonso Trigueros, the head teacher of a local school, told the Financial Times. “A lot of children know the songs, so they’d start singing along in class. It wasn’t very easy to teach.”
All will fall silent for a while, though, with the club suspending upcoming concerts after a successful legal challenge by locals. The decibel limit for concerts in built-up areas is 53, but some of those at the Bernabeu were hitting the 85 mark.
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It’s estimated that the cost of renovating the stadium will eventually pass the €2 billion mark, so the hope was that making it Spain’s prime concert venue would help eat in to the debt. But now the club has to pay out for an extra layer to the stadium’s steel wrapping and further sound insulation.
Mind you, acoustic engineer José Antonio Almagro had a simpler recommendation.
“They could just turn down the volume at the concerts,” he told the FT.
That could work.
Quote
“‘Kyohn’ is the pronunciation. I kind of gave up on it because it was so difficult to get people to pronounce it. The Irish just say it and it rolls off the tongue, but for English people . . .” – Martin Keown on 58 years of being called Key-owen.
By the Numbers: 1
According to @OptaJoe, only one player with all the letters of ‘Hogmanay’ in their name has ever played in the Premier League on New Year’s Eve: Fulham’s Timothy Castagne. Mind-blowing research.
Word of Mouth
“If they allow me to, I’d love to.” Luke Littler on the prospect of parading his World Darts Championship trophy around Old Trafford. Go on, insert your own gags here.
“The guys in Saudi Arabia are overweight. They eat McDonald’s every day. Come to France overweight and see how long you last.” Former French international Adil Rami responds, a bit rudely, to Cristiano Ronaldo’s claim that Saudi’s Pro League is stronger than Ligue 1.
“He can go to the top, this kid is just special, very special. For an 18-year-old to be that good, that comfortable, that strong . . . it was like he was built in a lab. I said that to him the other day, it’s just ridiculous how good he is.” Declan Rice hell-bent on keeping Myles Lewis-Skelly’s feet on the ground.
Rooney yesterday’s man
The loudest chuckles last week? Probably from those who saw who featured in the January page of Plymouth Argyle’s 2025 calendar. Yes, Wayne Rooney . . . who was sacked on December 31st, 2024. Mind you, there wasn’t much chuckling from Manchester United quarters. Their January man? Marcus Rashford.
Maupay mocks struggling Tofs
Neal Maupay upset Evertonians just a tad after their 2-0 defeat by Nottingham Forest a week-ish ago when he took to Twitter and typed: “Whenever I’m having a bad day, I just check the Everton score and smile.” The fact that he is still, technically, an Everton player, albeit on loan at Marseille, upped the outrage levels several notches.
No one was angrier than former boxing world champion and Everton devotee Tony Bellew. “He’s a muppet,” he told talkSPORT. “He should worry about the team he’s actually playing for because while he was at Everton, the last thing he did was play football – he was useless.” He was too, in fairness – just the one goal in 32 appearances.
Mercifully, Marseille have an obligation to buy Maupay at the end of his loan, so he won’t be back at Everton any time soon. Not that it was ever likely he would return. When he left for Marseille what film clip did he tweet? Andy Dufresne escaping from prison in The Shawshank Redemption.
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