Real Madrid will also be playing a couple of matches on the hallowed turf of Australian rules football,  the MCG, which will be home for a week to the superstars of the global game in town for the ICC – the International Champions Cup.

The title may be a misnomer, as none of the trio involved in this tournament – Italian giants AS Roma and premiership big boys Manchester City are the other two  – are current champions of their own country.

Barcelona headed Madrid in La Liga last campaign, Chelsea dismissed City in the premiership title battle and Juventus were too good for Roma in the last  Serie A season.

But that matters little to the marketing people who put on these events. It would hardly sound the same if this edition of the ICC was presented as the Runners-Up Repechage, and to be fair to Madrid, in particular, they are legitimately a champion club with 32 La Liga titles and 10 European Cups to their name.

Roma have been Serie A champions three times in their 88-year history by way of comparison while City have won one more English championship (four) than the Giallorossi have in Italy,  although the Sky Blues  have been around for a lot longer, having become City  in 1894.

Madrid, with their galaxy of galacticos headed by Cristiano Ronaldo and Gareth Bale, kick off the action at the MCG next Saturday when they face  Roma, home for the past 25years of a man Australian fans know all too well – Francesco Totti, the gifted striker who put away the penalty that knocked the Socceroos out of the 2006 World Cup in Germany in that dramatic round-of-16 game.

After that Roma meet ex-Premier League champions City, another of the soccer world's plutocrats, before the Sheik Mansour-owned City take on Madrid in the final game of the three-match series on Friday, July24.

This is a big-time affair. Local fans are disappointed that there is no place for either of the Melbournes, Victory or City, but that's not how the game works at this rarefied, money-making level. Even the fact that Melbourne City are owned by Manchester City could not get the Victorian side an invite to this party.

But  the matches will lure visitors to the city and increase business and economic activity, especially in the tourism and leisure sectors which is what these glamorous out-of-season invitational events are designed to do. And no one should be under any illusions about the scope and scale of the Madrid brand name, image and reputation.

The Spaniards have been the biggest soccer club in the world , a position Real have held for the past decade as the wealth and revenues generated by their continued success have consolidated  and pushed them past former market leaders Manchester United.