Mallorca stumbles with Catalan: controversy over an advertisement with five spelling mistakes
It is already a long-standing demand that the club make its communications in Catalan.
PalmRCD Mallorca's latest promotional ad has sparked controversy. The club advertised the upcoming match at Son Moix – the Mallorca-Elx game, the last of the year – and the special offer for attendees in several newspapers. However, the advertisement, written in Catalan, contains as many as five spelling mistakes. Catalan has always been a weak point for the club, and many fans have demanded its inclusion in official communications in recent years. In this particular ad, the spelling and grammar leave much to be desired.
- 'The Offer'
The offer must have an apostrophe because it is a feminine word beginning with a vowel that does not begin with 'i', 'u', 'hi', or 'hu'.
- 'Last' match of 2025
"Último" should have an accent mark because it is a word that does not end in a vowel. Furthermore, it should also be noted that although it is neither a spelling nor a grammatical error, the usual way to refer to the Balearic Islands in the last match is "el último partido" (the last match).
- One price for everyone
In this case the club has omitted the preposition A. In this case, 'para' indicates the recipient of the price, that is, 'everyone'.
- "In all areas of the stadium while supplies last"
This simple sentence contains two spelling errors. First, they omitted the weak pronoun 'en', which would indicate the replacement of the noun phrase 'todas las zonas del estadio' (all areas of the stadium), introduced by the preposition 'de', which functions as a noun complement. Second, they omitted the preposition 'a' (to) in the construction 'hasta' (until). In this case, 'hasta' indicates a temporal value in the sentence and is preceded by an infinitive clause, so the construction 'hasta' is necessary for the sentence to be correct. That is, the correct sentence should be: "En todas las zonas del estadio hasta agotar existencias" (In all areas of the stadium until supplies last).
If you analyze the ad phrase by phrase, there is only one, the first one (Your club, your gift, fill the stadium) without any spelling mistakes. Furthermore, the advertisement includes Anglicisms such as 'Hot dog', 'Fan Zone', 'Premium' and 'Packfamiliar'This announcement has further fueled the controversy among fans who demand a greater presence of Catalan at the club and who view with anger and sadness that, when Mallorca chooses to communicate in its own language, it does so in this way. "Mallorcan or Catalan identity at Mallorca is limited to the Dimonió (devil figure) and the peasant women on match days, who are forced to dance in order to collect a subsidy from the Consell de Mallorca (Island Council of Mallorca)," one fan stated. The errors can be found in the print edition of the newspapers, while in the social media post, with the exception of the phrase "in all areas of the stadium while supplies last," the other errors do not appear. ARA Baleares has attempted to contact Real Mallorca for comment but has received no response.
Catalan in club communications, a constant demand
In August, Plataforma por la Lengua (Platform for the Language) denounced that Real Club Deportivo Mallorca had made decisions that constituted an "unjustified exclusion of the local language in a symbolic and identifying element for the fans." They criticized the lack of a Catalan option for the season ticket, arguing that it represents a step backward, given that a few years ago the season ticket was available in Catalan, and that the club's email newsletter is only in Spanish, and that much of the club's audiovisual production also excludes the local language.
However, they asserted that the club's decision to omit Catalan from its official channels "not only makes the language invisible, but also contributes to the denormalization of its use among the population." As they emphasized at the time, by eliminating Catalan from the club's official communications, the message being sent is that Catalan "is neither necessary nor appropriate in prestigious spaces with broad social reach." "This directly impacts the perception that young people and the general public have of the language and weakens its presence in informal settings, leisure activities, and collective identity," they lamented. "To renounce Catalan is to renounce a key tool of Mallorcan identity and culture," they affirmed.