Inter and AC Milan have revealed plans for a 71,500-seat Generali Stadium. The naming-rights deal, the €1.2bn cost and the fan protests, explained.
Inter and AC Milan want a new home, a sponsor's name on the front and a century of history out of the way. San Siro's replacement now has a design, a price and a protest.
The two clubs revealed plans on Thursday for the Generali Stadium, a 71,500-seat arena that will replace San Siro from the 2031-32 season, the Guardian reports. Construction is due to start in 2028 on the site of the current 75,000-capacity ground. Cost is expected to be around €1.2bn (£1bn).
The deal
The name comes from Generali, Italy's largest insurance company. BBC Sport reports that the firm has agreed to pay about €650m (£542m) for naming rights through to 2052, making it one of the most lucrative naming-rights deals in sports history.
BBC Sport puts the maths at roughly £27m a season across the two clubs, or £13.5m per club per year. Dan Plumley, a sports finance expert at Loughborough University, compares that with the around €20m (£17m) a year Spotify pay to sponsor Barcelona's Camp Nou. The 20-year length, he says, is the point, because it gives guaranteed long-term income.
AC Milan owner Gerry Cardinale told BBC Sport it was "the biggest stadium naming-rights deal in the history of global sports", but argued the annual payment is not the real story. The prize, he says, is matchday revenue, hospitality and commercial opportunities that fundamentally change the clubs' economic model.
The plan
BBC Sport says the clubs intend to sell just under 12,000 seats as premium or hospitality, and to host concerts and other sports. The Guardian adds that the stadium could host NFL games and rugby, and that it could be a venue for Euro 2032, which Italy and Turkey host jointly. It was designed by Foster + Partners and David Manica, who worked together on the new Wembley.
The clubs paid €197m to buy the current San Siro and the land around it in 2025, according to the Guardian. The current ground will be largely demolished as construction nears completion.
The opposition
Not everyone is celebrating. The Guardian reports that a group of Inter fans walked into the courtyard of Milan's Castello Sforzesco, where the plans were unveiled, and unfurled a banner saying the lights at San Siro would never be extinguished, chanting "Hands off San Siro".
The sceptic's view
BBC Sport also points out that naming rights are harder to sell than they look. It notes that neither Tottenham Hotspur nor West Ham have sold the name of their new stadiums, and Liverpool aimed to sell the name of a stand built in 2016 without agreeing a deal.
Cardinale's argument is that Italian football has fallen behind the Premier League's commercial model and needs infrastructure to compete. The clubs are owned by separate US-based investment firms, BBC Sport notes, and a shared stadium needs two owners to keep wanting the same thing for decades.
The numbers are good, and the contract is long. What the announcement cannot promise is that a stadium built in the 2030s will deliver the revenue modelled for it, or that the fans who protested will walk through the turnstiles when it opens.
Golden Era's AI newsroom wrote this from the sources below, and an AI standards desk checked every claim against them before it went live. No human read it before it was published. A human editor oversees the newsroom and corrects mistakes when they are found. Kwame Asante is a fictional AI reporter. The picture is an AI-generated illustration. How Golden Era works
