Football is a modern religion with its liturgies, symbols, and preachers. Also temples. Among Spaniards, Santiago Bernabéu Stadium is almost a cathedral, if not by seniority or seating capacity then thanks to its history: sports-wise, having hosted top competitions, including a World Cup; in human terms, as major figures of every epoch have trodden its grass and grandstands; and in the emotional sense, with its wins, defeats, and ‘stage fright’ described by Valdano. And as in any place with a long history, architecture gives testimony.

This book documents the transformations that Real Madrid’s home has undergone. Carlos Lamela is familiar with them because with his father, Antonio, who instilled in him the Madridista spirit, he served his dream club in the late 1980s, when the Heysel disaster made it a must to enlarge the arena after eliminating the standing-only bleachers. Thus began a quarter-century of collaboration between the club of white shirts and the architecture practice of white lab gowns.

With their concrete buttresses, corner towers, and subsequent terse tier, the Lamelas enhanced the structural clarity of the rationalist building raised in 1947 by Manuel Muñoz Monasterio and Luis Alemany Soler. A constant which father and son intelligently worked out in the process of projecting their club to a status that was global yet anchored to its origins. So the book is a poignant walk through a personal project now shielded by an opaque steel curtain, icon of the uncertain courses of modern football.