Fantasy Football: Real Madrid Resort Island

Are there no limits to the global ambitions of football clubs? Once upon a time, these ambitions were reserved for sweatshop workers in the Far East churning out replica kit for sale to workers in the Far East who didn't work in sweatshops. Now, they have become altogether grander. How better to market your football club than to name an entire island after it.

Real Madrid Resort Island is due to open its doors (turnstiles might seem more appropriate) at the beginning of January 2015. It is far away from Madrid and far away from Spain, a tourism complex and theme park in Ras al-Khaimah, an emirate among the globally ambitious, sporting-linked collective of the United Arab Emirates.

There is more than a touch of the bizarre about this concept. It has overtones of Python's "Whicker Island", though in Python-land, Real Madrid Resort Island would probably have been Accrington Stanley Resort Island, a theme park comprising grimy northern scenes, back to back houses rather than luxury apartments, next to a slag heap instead of yet more velvety white sands.

"When an emotional brand creates an emotional place," says the promotional video, replete with a quickening heartbeat, which then, against a soundtrack with a suitably Arabic hint, announces the delights that await the anticipated one million visitors in year one. Among these will be the world's first hologram football show, reconstructed Ronaldos taking on imaginary Barças and Uniteds and presumably always winning. Let's face it, the last thing Real Madrid Resort Island needs is an unsuccessful team, so why not just stage an illusion of a football match and make sure the result always goes the right way.

The emotional brand creating the emotional place is the "perfect partnership", continues the video. Perfection is the collision of one of the world's leading and richest football clubs with one of the richest parts of the world. Perfection lies in richness and in two partners with plenty of moolah at their disposal. One billion dollars are to be invested.

The resort with its amusement park, its 60 bungalows, its 400 apartments, its 48 villas and its own Real Madrid museum is of a scale unimaginable in Mallorca. Well, not completely unimaginable, but while a new theme park ever actually opening on Mallorca is probably unlikely (and what, pray, has happened to it?) and while Utz Claassen, were he to in fact untangle his legal issues at Real Mallorca and offer a footballing holiday to a few hundred Germans to bolster the crowds at the Iberostar, would have to wait approximately five seasons' worth of home matches to get to one million attendees, the United Arabs just go full steam ahead, create a whole island and eventually, and don't dismiss the possibility, end up uprooting an entire football club of their own. Real Madrid Resort Island will also boast the first ever football stadium "open to the sea". And who will be playing there?

If anything exposes Mallorca's place in the grand scheme of international tourism, then the Real Madrid-ing of an emirate no one had previously heard of is it. Years of faffing around attempting to raise a few bob to rebuild Playa de Palma, and what happens? The Arabs come along, create an emotional place and nick a football team into the bargain.

This all said, who would actually want to go to the resort? A Real Madrid fan? A real Real Madrid fan? I'm not so sure. The unreal Real Madrid fan from other emirates, from the Far East (those not in sweatshops), from Japan; they will probably go, as will those persuaded by a global branding exercise which, through theme-parking, puts the club on a par with Disney.

Football is now the least of it, which is probably why Real Madrid will ultimately dispense with footballers completely and simply play virtual matches in the United Arab Emirates Hologram League of endless games against a simulated Manchester City for whom Carlos Tevez may as well have been a hologram for the past few months. It is the ultimate in fantasy football, played on a fantasy island in front of cheering Chinese fans as a make-believe Mourinho leads out his team.

If you hadn't previously been convinced that football had lost touch with its roots, then you now should be. The roots are being replanted far, far away in the pursuit of what we now have to call "sportainment". It's enough to make you hanker for the days of Accrington Stanley before they went bust in the sixties, for cloth caps and rattles, and for back to backs rather than luxury apartments. Real Madrid Resort Island? Football's last resort? No, a resort to football was last with us some time ago. Football's first resort, but football it isn't.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.