James Pallotta says the Stadio della Roma is “key” for the club, and wants to play American football there.
The Giallorossi have won approval to build a new ground in the Tor di Valle area of the city, and the President sees it as crucial to growing their revenue.
“In three years we’re hoping to have a stadium, and that’s the key,” Pallotta told the audience at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.
James Pallotta says the Stadio della Roma is “key” for the club, and wants to play American football there.
The Giallorossi have won approval to build a new ground in the Tor di Valle area of the city, and the President sees it as crucial to growing their revenue.
“In three years we’re hoping to have a stadium, and that’s the key,” Pallotta told the audience at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.
“Because we can’t compete with Barcelona on a day-to-day basis when they’re going to have a billion dollars in revenue in a year or two and we’re dealing with €220m.
“We’re building a stadium on 200 acres in Rome, we’ve got approval for 54,000 people but 250,000 square feet of entertainment space around it.
“So what we have is actually the stadium that will be the most used facility in all of southern Europe.
“You’ll see college [American] football games – Michigan already asked us to open it up – BC [Boston College] and Notre Dame is what we talked about opening it up with, a Holy War and the Pope flips the coin.
“We’ll have all the major concerts, all the minor concerts flowing through Rome, UFC etc etc.
“Then we’ll start getting more and more information, so ‘you like this? Well, you might like this that has to do with Roma’.
“So it’s taking us longer, we’ve been a little delayed in the stadium, final approval came about two months ago and then we can start generating double and triple the revenues we’re dealing with now.
“I don’t have a lot of patience and it takes a long time but we’ll get there.
“We know we’re never going to get a Barcelona fan to switch to become a Roma fan, but our goal from day one is that if there’s three billion football fans in the world, our goal is to be everybody’s second favourite team in the world.
“So if I can get 1 per cent of that 3 billion I’ve got 30 million, and if I could get those 30 million to spend on average just €5, which isn’t even a hat, then that’s €150m of incremental revenues and that’s a lot.
“It doesn’t pay for Neymar or Messi, but it might pay for their [Barcelona’s] backup right-back.”