MADONNA THE SOCCER MUM
Singer’s move to Lisbon so her son can be a star
SHE prides herself on being the Queen of Reinvention, a style and pop icon who has morphed effortlessly over the decades from slick Material Girl, to sex goddess in a bullet-bra, to Kabbalah chanting yogi. At one point she even became Lady of the Manor complete with country estate and an ‘English’ accent during her ill-fated marriage to Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels director Guy Ritchie. Now it seems Madonna is embarking on her most radical, and unexpected, shift to date. It’s the wholescale yet decidedly unglamorous transformation into a ‘soccer mom’ – a T-shirt-wearing symbol of suburban America, who spends her life shouting encouragement from the sidelines.
The Mail on Sunday has established that the 58-year-old singer is planning to uproot her family from their New York home and relocate 3,300 miles to Portugal so that her adopted son David Banda can play in the junior squad of the famous Portuguese club Benfica.
It is said that Madonna has already bought a spectacular €5.7m palace in the rolling hills outside Lisbon and is planning to enrol her younger children at the city’s exclusive €35,000-ayear French Lycée.
‘David recently spent a week at Benfica and his prodigious talents impressed everyone,’ a source explained last night.
The 11-year-old Malawi-born boy was adopted in 2006. ‘Madonna is determined to give her kids every opportunity in life and this one is too good to pass up. She and the family will be moving to Portugal in time for the new school year in September.’
The star recently spent a two-week holiday in Lisbon, staying in the €15,000-a-night presidential suite at the Hotel Ritz, and viewed multiple
‘She has always wanted what is best for her kids’
properties in the city before settling on the stunning 18th Century Quinta do Relogio Palace, a Unescoprotected property once owned by a Portuguese nobleman whose colourful life inspired Alexandre Dumas’s novel The Count Of Monte Cristo.
It seems, for the moment at least, that her singing career is on hold.
But why would Madonna, a woman better known for outrageous selfpromotion than a keen appreciation of a flat back four, suddenly put her own ambitions on the back-burner?
No doubt it helped her decision to learn that Lisbon is emerging as one of Europe’s ‘hottest’ cities and is already favoured by a string of celebrities including Italian actress Monica Bellucci, fashion designer Christian Louboutin, designer Philippe Starck and former Manchester United footballer Eric Cantona. But the real answer, says a Hollywood source who knows her well, is more emotional.
‘Madonna lost her own mother very young and her greatest ambition in life is to be the mother she never had,’ he says. ‘However much you might criticise her, she has always wanted what is best for her kids.’ Madonna’s own mother, also called Madonna, died of breast cancer in 1963 when the star was just five years old, and the singer has spoken in the past about her heartbreak. Just last month she shared a poignant picture of her mother with her 9.6million Instagram fans, saying: ‘The greatest accomplishment of my life is to be the mother I never knew.’ Yet there is a more immediate motive, too, behind Madonna’s new-found interest in a normal life (or as normal as it can get for a global superstar). She was left ‘reeling and heart-broken’ over the unseemly court battle that ensued when her 16-year-old son Rocco left New York abruptly in 2015 complaining of her ‘cloying’ ways, and saying that he wished to have a more conventional upbringing with his father Guy Ritchie and stepmother, model Jacqui Ainsley. A bruising legal fight erupted which saw Madonna stopping midway through a tour to fly to London in an unsuccessful attempt to have Rocco return to America with her.
Reports at the time claimed Rocco was ‘fed up’ with Madonna’s strict house rules, which reportedly include following a macrobiotic diet and an insistence on daily exercise (she claims to do three hours of yoga every day).
Their rift culminated in confiscating his mobile phone when it interfered with his studies – at which point Rocco decided he would much rather be with his laid-back father.
She eventually conceded defeat and allowed Rocco to remain in London with Guy, though mother