Inter, AC Milan unveil plans for new stadium; San Siro set to be demolished

File photo: The clubs will continue to play at San Siro while the new stadium is built on an adjacent parking lot and then the iconic San Siro will then be mostly torn down. | Photo Credit: REUTERS

More than a century after it was inaugurated, Milan’s iconic San Siro marked another step toward the end on Thursday. And the beginning of Generali Stadium.

At one of Milan’s famous sites, Castello Sforzesco, the future of another historic monument was revealed as AC Milan and Inter Milan unveiled plans for their proposed new stadium, which would see the demolition of the Stadio Giuseppe Meazza — commonly referred to as San Siro.

And the two clubs — which have long shared a ground — have already sold the naming rights, with the new arena to be called Generali Stadium from day one. Generali is Italy’s largest insurance company.

The clubs had already announced agreements last year with architectural firms Foster + Partners and Manica to design a new stadium. Foster + Partners and Manica’s projects include Wembley Stadium in London, Chase Center in San Francisco, and Lusail Stadium in Qatar.

Norman Foster and David Manica presented the plans at Thursday’s briefing.

“It is always a challenge to design a building that replaces a beloved project. And the way I’m thinking about this project and the spirit that we began with from the beginning was: same soul, different building,” Manica said.

“The most important thing that we realised when we designed this project is that the San Siro is a feeling, more than a building; it’s a feeling. And everything that we needed to do here was to drive that feeling and carry it into the building,” he added.

At the heart of the design is a striking oval form, with the frame of the stadium made out of 80 huge diamond shapes and a sweeping double-curved roof.

The diamond shapes offer glimpses into the stadium from the outside and sweeping views across the city from within. The points of the diamonds are the tallest — 60 meters — at each of the ends behind the goals, known as “the curva” in Italian, where the hard-core fans normally sit.

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The stadium will be raised on a podium, with space underneath for parking, a museum and club stores. The venue will be part of a project covering approximately 281,000 square meters (more than 3 million square feet).

The 360-degree stadium bowl will have 71,500 seats across two tiers — in comparison to the three ‘rings’ of San Siro.

Those seats are so close to the field that “it’ll actually feel as though you’re sitting on the grass,” according to Manica, and rise up in steep walls — with seating inclinations of up to 37 degrees to amplify both atmosphere and visual impact.

The new stadium’s acoustic design has been engineered to capture and intensify crowd energy, not only to minimise noise disturbance outside the arena, but also to create what the clubs hope will be one of the best atmospheres in world football.

The exterior will also be customized through colored LED lighting and the ability to project images on the facade. The idea is to have a new stadium ready for when Italy co-hosts the 2032 European Championship with Turkey.

Construction is expected to begin in 2028, and the first match is targeted for the 2031-32 season, although Inter president Giuseppe Marotta expressed concern last year that slow Italian bureaucracy could delay the project.

The clubs will continue to play at San Siro while the new stadium is built on an adjacent parking lot. The iconic San Siro will then be mostly torn down.

It’s not the first time the Milan clubs have unveiled plans for a new stadium.

Two sets of plans were presented in 2019, with “The Cathedral” project by Populous chosen over Manica-Cmr Sportium’s “The Rings of Milano” design two years later.

The new stadium was expected to be ready by 2024 or 2025, but public debate and bureaucratic delays forced the Milan clubs to explore other options, before pivoting back toward a shared-stadium model on the San Siro grounds.

The deal to purchase San Siro was valued at 197 million euros (USD 226 million), and Milan president Paolo Scaroni has said the clubs would invest more than a billion euros in building the new stadium.

It has been estimated that the clubs could each make as much as 180 million euros (USD 208 million) a year from the new arena. For now, they make around 80 million euros (USD 93 million).

Increased revenue would come from attracting tourists on non-match days — to visit the museum or tour the stadium — as well as hosting concerts and other events and the sale of the naming rights to Generali.