How to get Mad Cool tickets with your group

Mad Cool is Madrid's big-swing festival: four days at Iberdrola Music, the purpose-built 185,000-square-metre campus in Villaverde on the city's southern edge, with five stages and a booking policy that reads like a stadium season. The 10th-anniversary 2026 edition drew 215,000 people for Foo Fighters, Lorde, Florence + The Machine, Nick Cave and Twenty One Pilots, with gates at 18:00 and music deep past midnight - Madrid summer logic, where the evening is the main event.

Nothing for 2027 is announced yet. Mad Cool runs a lineup-first cycle that lands in November, so this guide covers the rhythm that repeats every year. How the one-week sale works, what sells out first, and why the friendliest transfer rules in Europe make this the easiest big festival to buy for a group.

Mad Cool compresses its entire sale into days. The 2026 cycle is the template. Lineup announced 10 November. Member and Banco Santander presale from 17 November, with GA four-day passes at €225. General sale three days after that at €240, all through the official madcooltickets.com shop. Prices stepped again toward the festival, with late listings near €250. There's no blind early-bird tradition here. You just have to be ready the week the poster drops.

Scarcity then builds through spring: by festival week 2026 the GA four-day passes were sold out and the hottest single day (Florence, Lorde and Jennie's Thursday) was gone, while other day tickets lingered at €95. So a group has two honest windows - the November week for the best price on passes, and the spring for leftover days - and one hard rule: the full pass does not wait.

• The presale-to-general window is about one week: groups that debate past November pay more for less choice.
• GA four-day passes and the hottest day sell out; only the quieter day tickets survive to summer.
• There is no official resale channel - unauthorised resale voids every ticket the seller bought, so the group buys carefully and transfers privately.
• The venue is brilliant at 20:00 and notorious at 02:00: the exit crush is the most complained-about part of the whole experience.

Mad Cool's rules have been unusually group-friendly, and it's worth appreciating how rare that is. One caveat first: everything in this section describes the 2026 cycle. The 2027 terms haven't published yet, so treat it as a strong prior rather than a promise, and recheck the FAQ before you build a plan on it. In 2026 tickets weren't nominative, which the festival's own FAQ stated plainly, and you were allowed to pass them to friends and family as long as it's direct and at face value or free. You can buy ten in one order, and every wristband ships to a single address. Put those facts together and the method writes itself. One person buys, one delivery arrives, and you hand them out over dinner.

The sharp edge sits next to the friendliness: there is no official resale marketplace, and unauthorised resale voids all of the seller's tickets, not just the resold one. Refunds exist only for cancellation or substantial changes. So the group's protection is buying the right number for real people - the transfer freedom handles the rest.

The Mad Cool method is the designated-buyer play at its purest. Before November: agree who is in, collect budgets that survive the general-sale price, and pick the buyer. Announcement week: the buyer watches the presale windows - membership and Santander customers get the kindest prices - and takes the whole group in one order. After that, the only jobs left are handing out the wristbands and planning for a Madrid July, which mostly means sun cream, late dinners and a sensible way of getting home.

After the buy, Mad Cool is a logistics festival: 35-degree afternoons that turn into perfect evenings, free water points but scarce shade, re-entry allowed with the wristband, cashless top-ups refundable for a month after, and the infamous journey home - the city laid on night trains and shuttles to about 03:30 in 2026, and they were still the pinch point.

The version of Mad Cool worth having is four golden-hour evenings with the best lineup in Spain, bought at November prices, wristbands handed out weeks in advance, and a pre-agreed plan for getting home. All of that costs you one focused week in November and one organised person. Everything after it is just Madrid in July.

TicketSquad gives your group one home for that week. Who's actually in, whether they want the four-day pass or single days, and a budget ceiling that survives the general-sale price rather than the presale one. Plus wristband custody afterwards, because ten wristbands landing at one flat is its own small logistics problem.