MADRID — The takeover was in motion. As the Miami Dolphins and Washington Commanders were still in the air, posters adorned with the faces of their players already lined the streets here.
Meanwhile, Santiago Bernabéu Stadium was undergoing a transformation from being the home of Real Madrid to the site of Spain’s first NFL game. The process will take only a few days, but planning it took years.
MADRID — The takeover was in motion. As the Miami Dolphins and Washington Commanders were still in the air, posters adorned with the faces of their players already lined the streets here.
Meanwhile, Santiago Bernabéu Stadium was undergoing a transformation from being the home of Real Madrid to the site of Spain’s first NFL game. The process will take only a few days, but planning it took years.
There are a lot of factors that go into where the NFL plays its international games. The biggest: Is there a stadium that can host a football game?
More than crowd capacity, it comes down to dimensions. An NFL field is 120 yards long and 53.3 yards wide, but a standard professional soccer field is 115 yards long and 74 yards wide. Given the smaller size of soccer teams, locker rooms also are typically much smaller than what football teams need.
With all of those considerations, the league sent a contingent to explore options in Madrid a few years ago. It landed on Bernabéu as the top pick and announced in February 2024 that it would stage a game there. This May, the teams were revealed.
Bernabéu, which opened in 1947, already was undergoing an expansive renovation project with an estimated cost of 1.3 billion euros (about $1.5 billion) that was completed late last year. Nonetheless, there were significant tweaks that the NFL made in concert with stadium executives and local officials. After roughly a year and a half of collaboration, the league is confident the stadium will be ready to go when the Dolphins “host” the Commanders on Sunday.
“It’s one of the most iconic stadiums in the world,” said Jon Barker, NFL senior vice president and global head of major events. “Obviously, Real Madrid is the biggest football club in the world. It gave us an opportunity to bring the NFL and Real together and be able to play our game in such an iconic stadium.”
To fit both end zones, the NFL determined the Bernabéu field needed to be extended by a little more than 1½ yards on both sides. That’s a small distance, but pulling it off required significant construction.
The front stands behind each end zone had to be demolished and rebuilt, as did concrete layers and subflooring as part of the field extension.
Construction also was required to expand the locker rooms. That included knocking down walls, building facilities such as showers and toilets, redoing plumbing and installing equipment and hardware.
The renovation did cut down some of the infrastructural work. The cabling and fiber, LED lights and ribbon boards, broadcast cameras and presentation control rooms already were fit for what the NFL needed.
Altogether, the upgrades took about a year to complete. Naturally, Bernabéu has had to host Real Madrid games and other events during the construction.
“They clean it up, they dress it, they get it ready for a game and then as soon as the game’s over, they get back to work on the renovation,” Barker said. “So we just simply jumped into that schedule with them. And on their off days, their dark days, we were doing the work that we needed to do. … I don’t think anybody that didn’t know what was happening inside that stadium on the off days would have any idea that it was a construction zone.”
Figuring out where the teams would practice was the easy part. The Dolphins will do so at Metropolitano Stadium. It has a natural grass field and serves as home to Atlético Madrid. The teams have ownership ties through private equity firm Ares Management, which purchased a minority stake in the Dolphins last year.
The Commanders will practice on two fields at Ciudad Real Madrid, the club’s practice facility. The fields have a hybrid surface that combines natural and synthetic grass. Real Madrid conducts annual renovations of all of its fields.
“We’re not having to replace the fields ahead of time,” NFL field director Nick Pappas said. “They obviously have a robust grounds team that looks after their field year-round.”
The trickier task was ensuring the playing surface for game day is up to par. That has been an issue in the past. After a game between the Seattle Seahawks and Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Munich in 2022, players complained that the field was too slippery. That issue cropped up again in the São Paulo game between the Green Bay Packers and Philadelphia Eagles in 2024.
To prevent such issues, Pappas got started early. He took his first trip to Madrid in September 2023 to meet Real Madrid’s grounds crew, learn their processes, get a feel for the climate and assess the field conditions. He has returned six times to deepen rapport and repeat that cycle.
“I don’t get the luxury of being on-site 12 months a year at that one location, so it’s important to establish a relationship with the on-site grounds crews,” Pappas said.
The teams also have a lot to handle for international games. Typically, they send over a group early to start preparing.
“It’s been a lot of people here that have spent a lot of time to get into the spot to get ready,” Commanders Coach Dan Quinn said Monday. “That’s from practice to the hotel to where we’ll go to when’s the best time to travel to time difference and how to speed that up as we’re going. We’ve put a lot of work in. We’ve done some trips together, but not overseas together, so we’ve tried to make it as much like a normal, extended road trip so the players can just kind of focus on getting exactly everything we want lined up to play like we can.”
To assist, the NFL relays information to team equipment managers, athletic trainers, physicians and other staffers throughout the season.
“That way, when they arrive, they understand the type of field they’re going to be on, how they should think about it and prepare,” Pappas said. “When a club shows up, they’re familiar with what to expect.”
Bernabéu’s field, a hybrid ryegrass surface that’s divided into six trays, is unique. Every tray can be lowered below the surface, which is where they’re grown. It’s essentially an underground greenhouse.
The only time the field is moved up is when it’s time for a game. While it’s an unusual setup, getting it ready will be simple.
“They have a tremendous field. It is in great condition,” Barker said. “So, from an actual playability standpoint, not a tremendous amount had to happen there.”
On Monday, Pappas, his team of about a dozen and the in-house grounds crew brought the sections of the field up to make sure they were properly loaded into the field tray. On Tuesday, they finished the extension project by adding a section of adjustable platforms to the field tray and installing grass on top. They plan to start painting the field Wednesday and make installations such as the field goal posts through Saturday.
Every year, the NFL/NFLPA field surface committee agrees to a set of standards that playing surfaces must meet. The field at Bernabéu has to be tested between 24 and 72 hours before kickoff.
If things go off without a hitch, the NFL is hopeful this game will be the start of a long relationship.
“Madrid is proud to be hosting this game,” Barker said. “You’ve really got a community that’s welcomed the NFL, rallied around this game and has really made everything available and accessible to us.”
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