New stadium project, president Tommaso Giulini’s words

Cagliari Calcio president Tommaso Giulini spoke at the conference “The Future of Italian Stadiums,” hosted by the Parma Serie A Festival. The project for Cagliari’s new stadium was at the center of the discussion.

MORE THAN TEN YEARS OF WORK
“Our journey towards the new stadium in Cagliari began over ten years ago, when I took over the Club the team played between Trieste, Tempio Pausania, Quartu Sant’Elena. I arrived in a situation in which Cagliari did not, in fact, have a stadium in which to play its home matches, in a few months – thanks to the Mayor of the time, Massimo Zedda and the municipal administration, the same one that has been back in the saddle for a few years – we managed in a short time to to return to the Sant’Elia Stadium even with a limited capacity and then to build our current Unipol Domus, in just over three months of summer we have been playing at that facility for almost ten years now, in September 2017. The hope, then, was that it would be a temporary stadium to then quickly move into the new stadium that will be built next door, in place of the old Sant’Elia”.

SO LONG TRIPS TO THE FINAL GOAL
“In recent years we have come across many bodies, which are within the Services Conference and the Provincial Supervisory Commission and which have requested many changes to the project over time. In the meantime, the markets, the geopolitical contexts, the municipal and regional administrations have changed. We managed to overcome all the project obstacles, then the odyssey linked to the economic and financial aspects began. We are talking about an Economic and Financial Plan, which apparently we are quite close to getting approved, which must be verified by numerous validators in order to obtain the Public Utility of the project. To achieve this, the professionals in charge require many details on aspects related to agreements with private individuals, which however may be subject to changes over the years due to normal market dynamics. This applies to naming rights and other key elements such as the fee that Cagliari will pay to the concessionaire of the new stadium.

THE FRENCH MODEL
“I believe that if there wasn’t an Italian entrepreneur in Cagliari who decided to lead the Club all these years, rather than an entrepreneur or a group intending to carry out a real estate business, today the city and the Club would have no chance of having a stadium. I think the example to follow could be the French one: in 2010, when they learned that they would host the 2016 European Championships without having to share them with another country as is the case in 2032 between Italy and Turkey – the transalpine stadiums were all obsolete, apart from the Stade de France, the only one that respected UEFA standards was the Stade de France. A task force was launched to renovate or build the stadiums: two (the Parc des Princes in Paris and the Lyon stadium) with private funds, Marseille in public-private partnership, we are talking about three large entities in terms of size of the city and caliber of the teams, comparable to Rome, Milan and Naples not only in the big cities, which is why three stadiums (Lens, Saint-Etienne, Toulouse) have been completely renovated with public resources, another three (Bordeaux, Lille and Nice) built from scratch. If France has financed over 800 million for the stadiums through local authorities, I think there is a way to have other stadiums in Italy in addition to Juventus’ in a reasonable timeframe.”