Milan CEO Paolo Scaroni highlighted how the club are ‘moving forward like a train’ in their quest to build a new stadium in San Donato.
The Rossoneri have been exploring solutions to build a new stadium for a number of years now, ready to finally leave the city-owned Stadio Giuseppe Meazza after almost 100 years. Only a handful of clubs in Serie A privately own a stadium, including Juventus and Atalanta.
Owning their own stadium will allow Milan greater control of branding and give them extra streams of revenue, including concessions and non-sporting events like music concerts.
Speaking via MilanNews.it, Scaroni first discussed Milan’s new stadium project in San Donato.
“It’s been four years since we started talking about the stadium. Today we have arrived at this plan for San Donato, which had already been on our agenda for over a year.
“Now we are working on it intensively, we have done in-depth work. We are just at the beginning, we are starting with a variant request.
“We have clear ideas about how the stadium will look, we have done a series of in-depth analyses. On the level of authorisations, we are talking with the owners of SportLifeCity and obviously with the City of San Donato.
“It is a process that is on the right track, but that does not mean that we have reached the end.”
He refused to rule out the idea of leaving the San Siro area of Milan but made it clear that changes would need to be made.
“We are not here to say ‘goodbye and thank you’. The San Siro idea is further away but isn’t dead yet. Having a new stadium in the San Siro area and leaving the current facility standing is unacceptable, even the mayor Sala says so.
“The superintendent’s position is uncomfortable, he anticipates that the second ring is to be of architectural value and therefore cannot be demolished. This decision has left us, Inter and also the mayor interdicted, so it is up to him to see if he can remove this constraint.
“If he succeeds, a scenario could open up whereby the project, which is now sickly, would become healthy again. We, however, are moving forward like trains on the San Donato plan, a project on which we have worked a lot, with a lot of energy and money.”
Finally, Scaroni spoke in a little more detail about the new stadium plans in San Donato.
“We submitted the variant application to the municipality of San Donato today. It is a moderate variant because we were already planning to build sports facilities in that area and they will now be replaced by our stadium, which will be the most beautiful in the world.
“It will have 70,000 seats, so it will have an important capacity and even greater than several European facilities.
“It will be a sustainable stadium, we will have much easier access for everyone and we will maintain a vertical stadium where you can see the games very well. If everything goes as we expect, I expect to see the first game in 2028.”