Inter president Giuseppe Marotta has praised the work of AC Milan and Paolo Scaroni on the new stadium front, which has now become a joint project again.
A step forward was made last week as Milan and Inter finally presented their proposal to buy the San Siro area and build a new stadium earlier this week. The city council will evaluate the proposal and provide an answer by the summer.
There remain a lot of questions regarding the stadium project, particularly concerning the red side of the city given the €55m invested in the site down in San Donato. Our latest Substack bonus article aims to answer as many of those queries as possible.
Marotta spoke during the ‘Infrastructure and Sport: an asset for the country’ event organised by PWC with Calcio e Finanza and focused on the stadium issue, with the latest development concerning the Nerazzurri and the Rossoneri.
“Oaktree immediately proved to be attentive and focused on creating assets and seizing an opportunity to continue with a project. They connected to the splendid work done by Milan in the person of Paolo Scaroni,” he said (via Calciomercato.com).
They believed that the focus was to look at the stadium. It supported the initial activity of Milan until the ‘consecration’ last Tuesday with the filing of the proposal to purchase San Siro and the surrounding areas.
“It’s truly something extraordinary. Paolo [Scaroni] is experiencing it more intensely than I am, but I think it’s a huge need not only for the two teams but for a city like Milan.
On foreign ownerships, he added: “We have to realise that even in a city as vaunted as Milan, fortunately foreign ownership has arrived. We’ve moved on from a model of patronage [owners like Silvio Berlusconi], today we have 11 foreign ownerships and this must make us reflect on how, as a country, we are not able to support football.
“It’s normal that ownerships come with the aim of having balance and sustainability, but I think there is also an ethical reflection: with patronage the teams were very competitive, but from an ethical point of view it was not a model to follow.
“The owners today recognise that there is a business model in which the stadium has a fundamental value. Not only from a sporting point of view, in which among our problems there will be the one represented by the turf that we have not yet resolved, we have already redone it twice.
We had to think about whether to change the turf on Friday or not, we decided to continue and we hope for the best. Representing an asset, the stadium is a form of patrimonial value but also a generator of resources. It is normal that the stadium has a value equal to the sporting one.
“More than half of the clubs do not own a youth sector facility. If we do not start from there, the foundation is missing, we also need to invest there and that is where the State must intervene.
