The World's First "Superclub" Was Built on the Bones of a Dead One, and Teased by Will Smith

The Night League turned Ibiza's most famous nightclub failure into a 10,000-capacity "hyperclub" that topped DJ Mag's global rankings within a year of opening.

Landlord Ledger Publications • Profile • 2026-08-06

For nearly two decades, the site near San Rafael, Ibiza, held the Guinness World Record for the largest nightclub on Earth. Then it sat derelict, weeds pushing through its dance floor, its dome half-collapsed, a monument to how fast a category-defining venue can rot once the crowds stop coming. In August 2024, the operator group behind two of Ibiza's biggest clubs bought the wreckage, gave it a new name, and enlisted Will Smith to help announce it. Eighteen months later, that same site was voted the best nightclub on the planet.

From Ku to Privilege to Ruin

The venue now known as UNVRS began in the early 1970s as a modest restaurant and community swimming pool outside the village of Sant Rafael de Sa Creu, known then as Club San Rafael. It grew into Ku Club by the late 1970s, and through the 1980s it became one of the defining nightlife spaces in Europe. Freddie Mercury filmed the video for "Barcelona" with Montserrat Caballe there in 1987. Grace Jones, David Bowie, Jean-Paul Gaultier, and Valentino were regulars. Noise regulations in the early 1990s forced the open-air venue to build an enormous domed roof over its dance floor, a structure so large it was routinely compared to an aircraft hangar.

In 1994, Basque businessman Jose Maria Etxaniz bought the club and renamed it Privilege the following year. Under that name it hosted Manumission, the notorious weekly party that turned the venue into a global fixture of 1990s club culture and, at its peak, one of the two biggest nights on the island. Privilege's capacity of 10,000 people made it the Guinness-certified largest nightclub in the world, a title it held for years even as its business began to erode under competition from newer venues and the rise of daytime clubbing.

The decline turned structural in 2018, when an inspection found the club's operators had illegally modified the building to increase capacity beyond what its license allowed. Privilege was shut down, reopened in 2019 with entire sections closed off as unsafe, and then closed for good as the pandemic hit in 2020. By 2022, Palladium Hotel Group, part of Ibiza's Matutes business empire, had bought out the remaining stake from Etxaniz for roughly 20 million euros, ending a five-year legal dispute in the process. The site then sat empty for years. In 2024, demolition crews began tearing down what was left of the dome.

An Operator Buys the Wreckage

The buyer was Yann Pissenem, a French entrepreneur who arrived in Ibiza more than two decades ago and built The Night League into the operator of Ushuaia Ibiza and Hi Ibiza, two venues that between them have repeatedly topped global club rankings. In mid-2024, Pissenem's company partnered with the Matutes-controlled entity that owned the former Privilege site to acquire and rebuild it. Trade reporting placed the total investment in the range of 40 to 70 million euros, a figure that covers a near-total rebuild of the 6,500-square-meter structure into three interconnected rooms designed for modular, nightly reconfiguration.

Rather than reopen Privilege under its old name, Pissenem's team invented a new category for it. They called it a "hyperclub," pitched as the fusion of nightclub-level luxury and service with the physical scale and production values of an arena tour. The pitch was explicitly aimed at differentiating the venue from the existing "superclub" tier that Ibiza had defined for the rest of the world: Hi, Pacha, Amnesia, and Privilege itself in its prime. The name landed on UNVRS, pronounced "Universe."

A UFO Over Es Vedra

The announcement campaign, launched in July 2024, ahead of any confirmed details about the venue, centered on a viral video appearing to show a UFO near the Es Vedra rock formation off Ibiza's coast. The clip amassed more than 50 million views and spawned rumors of a Netflix docuseries before anyone connected it to a nightclub at all. Actor and musician Will Smith then posted his own video investigating the sighting, tracing it back to a drone that Pissenem was operating from the roof of the venue under construction. The reveal, in August 2024, confirmed UNVRS as the successor to Privilege and set a summer 2025 opening date.

It was an unusual marketing choice for a venue whose core product is European DJ culture, a scene that markets itself almost entirely through resident DJs, festival-style production, and word of mouth rather than Hollywood-adjacent stunts. But it worked as a signal of scale: a club that could recruit a global movie star for a teaser campaign was announcing, before a single ticket went on sale, that it intended to operate on a different order of magnitude than its neighbors.

The Opening and the Verdict

UNVRS opened on May 30, 2025, with a lineup built around Carl Cox back-to-back Jamie Jones, Joseph Capriati back-to-back the Martinez Brothers, and Michael Bibi. Over its first season, the venue hosted residencies from Anyma, David Guetta, Eric Prydz, FISHER, and elrow, alongside one-off appearances from Charlotte de Witte and Sara Landry. Anyma brought out rapper Travis Scott during a set; Carl Cox recorded an all-night vinyl set for BBC Radio 1. The closing party in October 2025 featured Black Coffee, Peggy Gou, and Anyma.

The industry's verdict arrived in April 2026, when DJ Mag released its Top 100 Clubs poll and placed UNVRS at number one. It was the first time in the poll's twenty-year history that a club had debuted directly at the top spot, and the first time any venue had reached number one within twelve months of opening. Pissenem's other two venues, Ushuaia and Hi Ibiza, took the third and fourth spots the same year, giving The Night League three of the world's four top-ranked clubs.

By mid-2026, dance-music trade press covering the island's 2026 season was treating UNVRS as an established fixture alongside Hi, Pacha, and Amnesia rather than a newcomer, folding it into standard comparisons of the island's superclub tier less than a year after its first show. Vanity Fair profiled Pissenem that summer, estimating that his combined operation generates close to 200 million euros during a single Ibiza season, though the outlet noted the figures were estimates rather than disclosed financials.

What UNVRS Actually Proves

The UNVRS story is less about nightlife than about entry dynamics in a fixed, mature market. Ibiza's superclub hierarchy had been effectively closed for a generation: Pacha since 1973, Amnesia since the 1970s, Privilege itself dominant for over two decades before its fall. Real estate scarce enough that a failed 10,000-capacity venue could sit empty for five years without a competitor claiming the site. What Pissenem demonstrated was that a single well-capitalized operator, willing to spend tens of millions of euros and invent a new marketing vocabulary rather than compete on the existing terms, could manufacture an entirely new tier above the incumbents almost overnight, and get the industry's own scorekeepers to ratify it within a single season.

That is a different kind of moat than owning a beachfront lot near Playa d'en Bossa. It is the moat of being the operator with the balance sheet and the brand equity from two prior number-one clubs to convince a market that its categories were due for a rewrite. Privilege spent thirteen years dying from competition it never fully answered. UNVRS answered by refusing to compete in the same category at all.