The Neighborhood Association of Those Affected by the Bernabéu has launched a new legal challenge against the Madrid City Council. After preventing the construction of the two underground parking lots, initially authorized by the Madrid City Council near the Real Madrid stadium, they are now attacking again the permissiveness of the capital’s administration led by José Luis Martínez-Almeida (PP) regarding another noise pollution issue. Specifically, the noise resulting from the American football league game between the Commanders and the Dolphins held in November 2025.
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The subject of the contentious-administrative procedure, reported first by El Confidencial and confirmed by this newspaper, is “the authorization resolution granted by the Directorate General of Sustainability and Environmental Control of the Department of Urban Planning, Environment and Mobility of the Madrid City Council dated November 13, 2025, for exceeding the established sound level limits due to the use of amplification or sound reproduction equipment and percussion instruments during the event ‘NFL, COMMANDERS VS DOLPHINS’ on November 16, 2025, with an indirect appeal against the Municipal Ordinance of the Madrid City Council for Protection against Acoustic and Thermal Pollution (OPCAT) on which the challenged act is based,” states the lawsuit filed on July 17.
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Brand issue
The Madrid City Council, through its Environment Department, justified this authorization, among other things, because “by associating with a brand so rooted in American culture as the NFL, the Madrid City Council will be able to promote the Madrid brand within one of its priority markets and maximize its promotion strategy.” It continued: “In fact, the NFL is the professional sports league with the most fans and highest television audience ratings in the United States.” For these reasons, the Delegated Sports Area considered that there were sufficient “reasons of general interest” and the condition of “special citizen significance” due to the organization of this event with special sports projection and understood it was appropriate to grant the organizers’ request for authorization to exceed the acoustic emission limits, in accordance with the provisions for the modification or temporary suspension of the maximum emission levels established in article 19.1 of the Madrid City Council’s Ordinance for Protection against Acoustic and Thermal Pollution. And, according to the subsequent study carried out, the Administration itself was aware in advance that exceedances of the limits would occur in the affected homes.
On the day of the event, November 16, 2025, the neighborhood association affected by the Bernabéu commissioned acoustic measurements from a specialized company, which concluded that the sound levels actually recorded during the event “far exceeded even the 75-decibel limit set in the authorization resolution itself.”
The technical reports from IAG Acoustic Engineering indicate that “exceeding the permitted value by 28 decibels is equivalent to having more than 600 noise sources than allowed” and “current legislation establishes maximum noise immission limits because it has been scientifically proven that exceeding these values directly affects the health of people exposed to these noises.”
For these reasons, in its lawsuit, the association requests the annulment of this authorization for also contravening European legislation and demands that the city council be ordered to bear the costs of the legal process arising from the complaint, whose acceptance is still pending in a contentious-administrative court in Madrid.