Bureaucracy stands in the way of new construction
Both semi-finals of the Champions League between Inter and AC Milan will take place in the venerable San Siro Stadium – in 2026 the arena, which has a capacity of almost 76,000 fans, will celebrate its 100th birthday. What sounds good from a football romantic point of view ensures that the two top clubs lose an estimated 60 million to 70 million euros in income every year. The stadium doesn’t belong to the clubs but to the city, it’s too old and building a new one is anything but easy in Italy. “It’s an Italian problem,” said Milan club boss Giorgio Furlani about the stadium situation.The Athletic“.
Inter and AC Milan have shared the stadium since 1947 – photo from 1955.
“The way you think about a stadium, a game day and the construction techniques is different today than it was then,” said Furlani, who sees the ancient stadium as a major disadvantage in terms of revenue. After all, on the transfer market you measure yourself against clubs from other countries, which in the case of Premier League clubs not only post about three times as much TV revenue, but can also earn significantly more on match days.
Milan in 39th place
Highest spending 2022/23To overview
“Milan are outbid by Bournemouth, Leeds, Brighton and Brentford and not Man City and Man United. That’s the reality, and that economic power is largely driven by TV rights. The other problem is the stadiums,” says Furlani. In the 2022/23 season, the clubs mentioned sometimes invested three times as much as Milan’s expenditure of almost 49 million euros.
On the transfer market, the Italian champions of 2022 are not in a league with Manchester City, which is also in the semi-finals of the “premier class”, where they are measured against the small clubs from England, some of which have better financial arguments. Against Leeds, for example, Milan was able to prevail when wooing Charles De Ketelaere (22), who, despite the higher offer from England, opted for the Rossoneri to play in front of an average of 72,000 spectators in one of the ten busiest football stadiums in the world.
Average attendance in Europe: Most people were in these stadiums in 2022/23
Italy expert: Inter and AC Milan are fighting bureaucracy on the stadium issue
Why it is so complicated to build a new stadium in Italy is a mystery. Jatin Dietl, Area Manager Transfermarkt IT, says: “The topic has been around in Italy for decades and still little or nothing works. Inter’s and Roma’s former presidents Thohir and Pallotta failed during their tenures, while Fiorentina’s president Commisso cited the stalled stadium projects as his greatest failures. While positive signals are now coming from Rome again, eleven years after the start of the project, Milan is still fighting bureaucracy. Which could lead to both Inter and Milan building their new venue outside of the city. But there is no real progress here either.”
Milan boss Furlani, who has held the job since the end of 2022 and used to cheer on the Rossoneri himself as a fan with his season ticket, says: “A colleague recently sent me a presentation from 2018. It said that we will play in a new stadium in 2022. That was ambitious, but we figured we’d have it by 2023, and I haven’t seen a single brick yet. That’s crazy. You look back and think, ‘Four years! That’s a long time.'”
The only top Italian club to move from its old stadium to a new one this millennium is Juventus. The record champions exchanged the Stadio delle Alpi for the Allianz Stadium in 2011, in the meantime they played in the Olympic Stadium in Turin. Juve got the stadium and the grounds from the municipality of Turin for a bargain price of 25 million euros – a circumstance that made the new building possible in the first place. It certainly didn’t hurt to have carmaker Fiat on your side. Although Serie A has made five appearances in the semi-finals of the three European cups this season with AC Milan, Inter, Juventus, AS Roma and Fiorentina, the venues, which seem antique by European standards, are likely to continue to be a major obstacle. “A topic that is vehemently blocking the growth of Italian football and yet there are no concrete approaches as to how these problems could be solved more quickly and easily in the future,” Dietl sums up.
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