Ciudad Deportiva, Madrid
Ciudad Deportiva was
Real Madrid
Completed under the presidency of
The site also contained the Pabellón Raimundo Saporta, built in 1966, where Real Madrid's basketball team played its home games for 38 years. Some of Europe's greatest players, including Dražen Petrović and Arvydas Sabonis of later NBA fame, once called it home.
Controversy
By the end of the 20th century the land surrounding the Ciudad Deportiva was no longer on the outskirts of Madrid, but had become a transportation hub with the north of the city and a financial area. Its location along the Castellana further increased the land's value. With Real Madrid's debts mounting in the late 1990s, plans to re-zone and commercially develop the land were mooted several times, but it wasn't until the presidency of Florentino Pérez that these plans came to fruition.
Although commonly believed to be a direct transaction in which Real Madrid sold the land to the Madrid city council, this is not in fact what happened. In 2000 there was a motion proposed, voted on, and approved in the Madrid parliament to re-zone the area of the Ciudad Deportiva, which until then was zoned for non-commercial purposes. In this vote, the Partido Popular (People's Party) voted in favor, while the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) voted against.
The agreement between Real Madrid and the local government stipulated that in exchange for re-zoning the land Real Madrid would cede a portion of the land to the Government. Then, in public project bids, both Real Madrid and the Government sold their portions to four corporations,
Although unnamed clubs requested that the European Union investigate the transaction, the EU found no wrongdoing or evidence of state subsidies.
Ciudad del Madrid
With a portion of the funds obtained from the Ciudad Deportiva, Real Madrid constructed new training facilities in Valdebebas, which like the Ciudad Deportiva in 1963, are currently on the outskirts of the city. The new facilities, named Ciudad Real Madrid and inaugurated in 2005, are extremely modern and at 1.2 square kilometres are ten times larger than the former facilities. This is the widest sport facility built in the world.
In these facilities we can find the training fields for all the teams of the
Real Madrid President Florentino Perez, who was at the origin of this city, said about it: "If the Real Madrid is universal, this will be its capital. A city opened to anyone, a football dream: the Real Madrid City".