Real Madrid and Real Sociedad will complete their suspended game on January 5, Spain’s football federation said on Monday.
The match was stopped on Sunday when a bomb threat emptied Santiago Bernabeu stadium with three minutes to play and the scored tied 1-1.
About 70 000 fans and players cleared the stadium, some players leaving in uniform. No bomb was found. The incident raised questions about how to protect crowds at sports events in Spain and elsewhere.
It was the first time a major Spanish sports event has been halted due to a bomb threat.
”Now we can say it was just a scare, and we hope it won’t happen again,” Real Madrid president Florentino Perez said on the team’s website on Monday.
He told the sports daily As: ”What happened is a very bad precedent … It’s scary that this sort of thing might become a trend.”
The next game to be played at Madrid’s giant stadium is a star-studded charity match on Tuesday organised by the United Nations Development Programme.
”The Match against Poverty: Ronaldo and Friends against Zidane and Friends” — which will feature formula-one world champion Michael Schumacher and other well-known soccer faces such as Christian Vieri and Alan Shearer — will take place as scheduled and the game won’t involve any extra security, said Aziyade Poltier-Mutal of the UN communications department from Geneva.
The match against Real Sociedad will resume on January 5 at 6pm local time. The teams will play the reminder of regulation time, plus four minutes of injury time.
The Basque newspaper Gara, often used by the separatist group ETA to announce its intended targets, reported that a device was set to explode at the stadium at 9pm local time.
The stadium was evacuated at 8.45pm.
The Interior Ministry confirmed on Monday that no device was found, adding that police are trying to identify the person responsible for the apparent hoax.
The cavernous stadium in downtown Madrid was evacuated within about eight minutes, officials said. Players were escorted to the street, covered with blankets against the winter chill.
”We were scared to death,” Real Madrid player Ivan Helguera said. ”It’s a shame that sports and politics get mixed up.”
The evacuation was front-page news in Spain.
”Macabre joke,” stated AS.
”Soccer is not a matter of life and death,” stated El Pais.
In May 2002, an ETA bomb exploded near Real Madrid’s soccer stadium hours before a Champions League semifinal against Barcelona. Seventeen people were slightly injured.
ETA wants independence for the Basque region of northern Spain and has been blamed for more than 800 deaths in its decades-old campaign of violence. — Sapa-AP