José Manuel Paredes, representative of the Bernabeu Victims Association: “I worked for the bad guys, I know the instructions” | Weekly El Pais

José Manuel Paredes (Madrid, 47) says that when he first called the famous journalist to talk to him about the noise problems that concerts at the Santiago Bernabeu had caused among neighbors, his laughter was heard even louder than the music of Carol Gee or Taylor Swift. Or some of the protagonists of the 18 concerts that took place at the venue before the club suspended concerts for six months on September 13th. Paredes, an expert in communications and crisis management with more than twenty years of experience in large corporations such as Price Waterhouse or Llorente y Cuenca, decided to join the Association affected by the Bernabéu on the June night when he turned 12 years old. The old son left his room almost crying, unable to do his homework. The night Dookie performed, “the walls were shaking,” the manager recalls.

One of his nine-year-old twins had already told him that on the eve of the next concert, during sound check, his class at the San Agustin school, located a few meters from the stadium, began to dance until they were stupefied. teacher. Paredes believed he could help him with the help of the contacts he had accumulated in the media over his long professional career. “I worked for the bad guys. I know the instruction manual. After the first meeting, I told those who had been there from the beginning that I could help with strategy. Now I can tell you that this is almost the best work in my career, and probono (without charging), only for my area and for my family, which is not small,” says Paredes, sitting on a terrace on Calle Padre Damiana, with the new Bernabeu behind him.

When he joined the movement, it had already unsuccessfully tried to establish communication with the club and the city council. Appearing in the media was not even considered. There was only one meeting with Emilio Butragueno, head of institutional relations, who, with the best manners, asked for patience and understanding: Real Madrid had to compete with clubs financed by Gulf countries such as Manchester City or Paris Saint-Germain. . Another follow-up meeting with the district councilor also did not help the increase in neighbors’ complaints, they said. “I was bothered by his arrogance and arrogance, the idea that we should be grateful that in our area we have something like the Eiffel Tower in Madrid. Given its opacity, I decided that our strategy should be complete transparency,” he recalls.

The first call to the journalist was followed by several jokes among his friends (“What? Making a revolution with the old people next door?”). That didn’t stop Paredes from getting to work. He called the most important Spanish newspapers (EL PAÍS published the first article on the subject on May 26) and then did the same with the international press. It took three months to catch Sam Jones, correspondent Guardian in Madrid, listened to him and accompanied him to tour to neighbors’ houses to see first-hand how unbearable the noise is. On July 25, an article appeared in their newspaper reflecting neighbors’ complaints. It took another three months to appear in New York Times. At the end of Romeo Santos’s September concert, he was caught with an Italian journalist, who couldn’t figure out what was causing the noise until the doors opened, the audience filed out, and someone vomited on his shoes. “They underestimated us. I don’t think the PP expected the district’s reaction. After all, it is in this district that they receive the largest number of votes (almost 70% in the last municipal elections). We had access to their arguments, which said that the protests were caused by people coming from outside the area, infiltrators and people of the left. Their scheme does not include the fact that if you annoy my life, I will answer you, no matter how much I belong to PP or Real. They didn’t count on the big firm partners, engineers and others coming together to condemn it, that it wouldn’t be two ladies with handbags and coats in the corner. There is no tradition of such professional groups in Spain.”

Paredes acknowledges that there are members of the association who prefer to remain anonymous for fear of any retaliation. “I think it’s a fear that’s more perceived than real,” he explains. “It comes from the idea that you can’t take a stand against the powers that be because there are consequences to doing so, especially if the company you work for does business with a derivative of the Madrid system or the ACS. “It’s more of a feeling than a reality.”

This crisis manager highlights the work of the association’s legal department, which has succeeded, from his point of view, in forcing the club to stop performing concerts for the time being (Real Madrid will continue to work to provide, during concerts, the precise conditions of sound production and emission, allowing concerts to take place at our stadium,” reads a brief message from the sports institution. In addition, the work of its president (Enrique Martínez de Azagra) and the man who runs the @RuidoBernabeu account in X. “This one eats everyone… They all of us hated, from some of the Madrid fans to people who expect us to be taken for granted simply because we are supposed to be rich, when in fact the real rich people are the investment funds involved in this project, or the club itself. And look, almost all of us here are from Madrid, including me. To all this chaos we now add fans of some artists who had to cancel their concerts. The most militant ones are representatives of K-Pop (on October 12 the stadium was supposed to host a Korean pop music event),” says Paredes.

A few months ago he had to face a new and unexpected threat. To cope with this task, he had to use other knowledge acquired during his professional career. “I worked for very large real estate companies. So when a study surfaced that said apartment prices in the area would rise 30% thanks to the concerts, I intervened. I saw the study and thought it was insufficient. On the association’s side, we suppressed this as best we could, but the information had already leaked to several media outlets, the two that the club always uses, and this led to attacks from some real estate agencies in order to persuade the most vulnerable neighbors to sell their floors. It’s things like this that make this group work, it’s not just a matter of contacts; This is, first of all, experience and knowledge,” he notes. And when asked what will happen to all this when the six-month break ends in March, Paredes shrugs and again turns to the professional knowledge of some of his association colleagues. “I don’t know, we have some engineers here and they think it can’t be soundproofed. They tried to give concerts under cover, and it turned out that you couldn’t hear it inside the hall, but you could hear much more outside. They tell me that given the condition of the stadium, it is impossible to hold another concert.”