MILAN (AP) – The new San Siro stadium should be completed by 2030. That’s what the Milan club wants.
but Inter Milan President Giuseppe Marotta expressed concern on Friday that the project could be delayed due to delays in Italy’s bureaucracy.
Inter and AC Milan Purchase completed On Wednesday, the 99-year-old stadium and surrounding area were removed from the city, paving the way for the Serie A club to demolish it and jointly build a new 71,500-seat arena.
The idea is to prepare a new stadium in case Italy co-hosts the tournament. 2032 European Championship With Türkiye.
“It is clear that the aim is to have this new stadium ready well before the start of Euro 2032 to ensure that it can be used during the European Championship,” Marotta said outside Milan’s Football Business Forum on Friday.
“We are faced with an Italian bureaucracy that is typically very slow, so we hope that all this will come true. We hope that it can be completed by 2030.”
“The slowness of bureaucracy”
Mr. Marotta was one of the speakers at the forum and participated in the opening panel. And there he thoroughly criticized the Italian bureaucracy.
“Over the past 15 years, 50 stadiums have been built in Europe with an investment of around $20 billion,” he said. “Meanwhile, only three stadiums in Italy have been modernized, so we are far behind.
“So we have to ask ourselves why. I think the main problem is not that we need more money, but the slowness of the bureaucracy here.”
Both clubs are owned by American companies, with Milan owned by the Redbirds and Inter by Oaktree.
“Think about it, two of the most important clubs in Italy are foreign-owned,” Marotta added. “It means the Italian system cannot support elite sport.”
The club has already announced deals with architecture firms Foster + Partners and Manica. design a new stadium. The venue will be part of a project covering approximately 281,000 square meters (over 3 million square feet).
New stadium opens every day
The deal to buy San Siro was valued at 197 million euros ($226 million), and Milan president Paolo Scaloni said both clubs would invest more than 1 billion euros in the construction of the new stadium.
It is estimated that each club could earn up to 180 million euros ($208 million) a year from the construction of new arenas. As of now, their revenue is around 80 million euros (about $93 million).
Increased revenue would come from hosting concerts and other events and potentially selling naming rights for the new arena, as well as attracting tourists on non-game days, such as museum visits and stadium tours.
“We want to build the best stadium in Europe because Milan is one of the capitals of European football and needs and deserves incredible infrastructure,” Scaloni said at a forum on Friday. “We want structures that are open to the world every day.
“If you go to San Siro now… there’s no one there. You’d be scared to walk through San Siro, because this building is either too full when there’s a match or empty when there’s no match. We want a place where something happens every day: restaurants, hotels, commercial activity, everything. By 2030, facilities like this will be built in Milan.”
___
AP Soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer
