Real Mallorca are not Real Madrid

This may not sound like a lot for a LaLiga Santander club, and if one compares Mallorca with another Real, Madrid, it is chicken feed. There has been talk of a naming rights deal for the Bernabéu of some 400 million - a year. But while Mallorca may be in the same football league, Real Madrid are in a totally different business league, one with an enormous global reach. They are a global brand.

For comparison's sake, a better one might be with the other big Madrid club, Atlético. It is one of a few clubs in LaLiga to have a naming rights deal. This is with the Chinese Wanda Group and is worth 9.6 million euros a year. Roughly speaking, therefore, Atlético's stadium is valued at ten times as much as Mallorca's. Given Atlético's successes in recent years, successes not shared by Mallorca, the 900,000 euros per annum seems like reasonable business for the Palma club.

But no one has been quibbling about the money. The spat is entirely political, the PSOE president of the Council of Mallorca, Catalina Cladera, having been accused by the other two parties that make up the governing pact at the Council - Més and Podemos - of having done the deal "in secret" and, to make matters worse, of having told the opposition about it before she told them.

Cladera, naturally enough, refutes these accusations. However, for the pact partners, there is a distinct whiff of what might lie ahead. Having sought the backing of the right, in particular the Partido Popular, they suggest that the stadium affair has been "a good test" for taking a different path. By which they imply, or at least I think they do, a tourism policy that differs to their own rather than to future electoral alliance, bizarre as a PSOE hook-up with the PP would be. There again ... .

Noses have been put firmly out of joint not by the cash - the Council is only in for 750 grand anyway, as the Balearic government and Palma town hall will pick up the rest of the tab - but by naming rights that double as tourism promotion. The stadium already is Visit Mallorca. Not that anyone in Mallorca calls it this, and not that anyone bat an eyelid when the naming rights were first acquired a couple of years back. Which begs a question as to why they're getting hot and bothered now, and a further one as to the impact of the existing arrangement that was established during the pandemic, supposedly as a means of reactivating tourism.

The two parties insist that more tourism promotion isn't needed, because of all the 'massification' there currently is. (Perhaps the naming rights did work then.) Were this tourism promotion to address seasonality, then maybe it would be ok, they have suggested. But it isn't, although I fail to understand how they can be so certain that it might not do. Nevertheless, might calling the stadium Visit Mallorca in January satisfy Més and Podemos?

What these parties appear to dread, as analysts have indicated, is a potential global reach of 130 million people. God, could you imagine that? No, and neither could I, because while Visit Mallorca may briefly flicker on screens in the Middle East or China, this apparent target audience will not be rushing to book travel to Mallorca (not that there are direct flights), as they have already decided to go to Madrid. Or Barcelona. Which is where the big boys play, including Atlético, who sold their stadium's name to a massive Chinese conglomerate which is involved in the sports industry among various others.

Real Mallorca are not Real Madrid. Nine hundred grand plays 400 million. Different league.