San Siro's beauty was never the argument for keeping it

Key takeaways

• The Guardian reports that Alessandro Costacurta, reflecting on the stadium's centenary, describes San Siro as an icon of great beauty that nonetheless does not function as a stadium should.
• A stadium's job in modern club finance is to generate income across a whole year, and that job is decided by circulation, concourse volume and hospitality space rather than by capacity or atmosphere.
• San Siro was built up in layers over decades, and each layer constrained the one that followed, which is why a deep refurbishment is closer to a rebuild than to a renovation.
• The strongest objection is that atmosphere is a genuine asset that new bowls frequently fail to reproduce, and that demolition writes off a century of embodied material and public memory.

The case rests on what a stadium is for, not on how it looks

There is no serious dispute about San Siro's aesthetic standing. It is one of the few grounds in world football that people travel to see rather than simply to attend, and the Guardian's interview with Costacurta is a reminder that even those who grew up elsewhere — he was raised in the province of Varese and supported the local side, going to San Siro only because his older brother followed Milan — absorbed its scale as something apart from ordinary football grounds.

The argument for replacing it is not aesthetic, and treating it as an aesthetic argument is how the debate gets lost. A stadium is a piece of revenue infrastructure. Club income divides broadly into three streams: broadcast money, commercial and sponsorship money, and matchday money. The first is set by collective negotiation and distributed by formula, so an individual club has almost no leverage over it. The second follows sporting and brand performance. The third is the only stream a club can change directly with capital, by building something that sells more per visitor, on more days of the year, to more kinds of visitor.

That is the standard against which Costacurta's word "functional" should be read. It is not a claim that the building is unsafe or unloved. It is a claim that the structure cannot be made to do the work that the economics of the game now demand of it — and, crucially, that this is a property of the architecture, which sentiment cannot argue with.

A building assembled in layers inherits the limits of every layer

San Siro did not arrive whole. It began as a rectangular, English-influenced ground, open to the weather — which is why, as the Guardian recounts, Costacurta's first visit ended after about a quarter of an hour when a downpour sent him, his brother and their father home. It was subsequently expanded, then expanded again, with an upper tier carried on external towers and a roof added over the top. The result is not a single design but a sequence of them, each built on the assumption that the previous one would stay.

That sequence sets hard limits. The volume available for concourses, kiosks, toilets and lifts is whatever the earlier structures left over, and it cannot be enlarged without cutting into the load paths that hold the newer tiers up. The number and width of vertical circulation routes determine how fast a crowd enters, moves at half-time and clears at full time, and those routes were fixed long before anyone designed a stadium around the assumption that spectators would spend money inside it. Hospitality — the boxes, lounges and club seats that account for a disproportionate share of matchday income in contemporary grounds — needs deep, serviced floorplates immediately behind the lower bowl. Retrofitting that into a stadium whose structure was set decades ago means removing and replacing precisely the parts that carry everything else.

Accessibility runs into the same wall. Steep upper tiers reached by ramp and stair are excellent for sightlines and acoustics and poor for anyone who cannot climb; provision of lifts, level routes and wheelchair positions distributed around the bowl is difficult to add to a completed structure, because it competes for the same scarce volume as everything else.

Two tenants in one building narrow the options further

San Siro's shared occupancy by Milan and Inter is unusual at this level of the game, and it changes the arithmetic in ways that are easy to miss.

A shared ground hosts roughly double the fixture load of a single-club stadium. That falls hardest on the pitch, which has to recover from more use with less rest, and it constrains the calendar available for concerts and other non-football events that help a modern venue pay for itself. The interior cannot be permanently branded for either tenant, so neither club gets the year-round identity that a wholly owned stadium provides — the museum, store, tours, restaurants and corporate hire that turn a building used fortnightly into a business used daily.

The decisive constraint, though, is what shared occupancy does to the refurbishment option. Rebuilding a stadium in place, tier by tier, while matches continue is possible but slow, expensive and disruptive; it typically requires playing through reduced capacity for several seasons, and often a temporary move. Doing that at San Siro would mean finding alternative arrangements not for one club but for two, simultaneously, in the same city, for the duration. The "just renovate it" position is not unreasonable, but it is rarely costed against that requirement.

Ownership and heritage rules decide this, not taste

The Italian model has historically made public bodies the owners of major grounds, with clubs occupying under concession. That arrangement has a logic — stadiums were built as civic assets — but it produces a familiar deadlock. A tenant club will not fund major capital works on someone else's building, because it cannot capture the return or borrow against the asset. A municipality with competing demands on its budget will not fund a stadium refit either. So the building ages while both parties wait for the other.

Layered on top is heritage law. Italian cultural heritage rules subject publicly owned buildings above a certain age to assessment by the state heritage authorities; where protection applies, demolition is simply off the table and even substantial alteration requires consent. The question of whether that protection attaches to a given structure — and to which parts of it — is therefore not a debating point but the switch that determines what is legally possible. The Guardian reports that San Siro is due to be demolished, which indicates that the legal route to removal is open; the precise scope of what will be retained, if anything, is not something this article can state.

What follows from all of this is that the outcome was never going to be settled by how beautiful the stadium is. It was going to be settled by who owns the land, what the law permits, and whether a structure assembled in stages can be re-engineered while in use.

The strongest case against is that atmosphere is not sentiment

The serious objection is not nostalgia, and it deserves stating at full strength.

Atmosphere is a product. It is generated by specific physical properties: proximity of the front rows to the touchline, the rake of the tiers, the continuity of the bowl, the height and material of the roof, and the resulting behaviour of sound. Grounds built in the era San Siro grew up in tend to score well on these because they were built steep and tight on constrained urban sites. Modern replacements are optimised against a different brief — sightlines, comfort, hospitality depth, accessible circulation — and those requirements push tiers back and flatten them. The result can be a venue that functions superbly by every commercial measure and never sounds like the building it replaced. That loss is real, it is not recoverable, and it is not captured in any revenue model.

There is a second objection with force. Demolition writes off the material already embodied in a structure — the concrete, the steel, the energy spent making them — and replaces it with newly manufactured equivalents. Reuse of existing building stock is increasingly treated in construction policy as an environmental default rather than an eccentricity, and a stadium is a very large quantity of existing building stock.

And there is a distributional point. "Not functional" is a judgement made by the parties who carry the financing risk, and the improvements that follow are typically weighted towards the higher-spending end of the ground. The supporters who supply the atmosphere that makes the venue valuable in the first place have the least say in the decision and, generally, the least to gain from it.

Specific evidence would change this conclusion

The argument here is conditional, and it can be defeated.

A credible engineering study showing that San Siro could be reconstructed in stages without relocating both clubs — with costs, a programme and a capacity profile through the works — would remove the strongest structural objection to refurbishment. No such study is referenced in the material available here, and its absence is not proof that one is impossible.

Detail on the replacement would also matter: the rake of the tiers, the distance from the front row to the pitch, and the roof design determine whether the acoustic qualities survive the move. If those are specified to match what exists, the loss narrows considerably. If they are not, the trade being made should at least be named honestly.

Finally, the terms of the arrangement matter. What the public gets in return for land that was publicly held, how much of the existing structure is preserved, and what happens to the site around it are the measures by which this will be judged in thirty years. Those details are not established here, and it would be wrong to assume them in either direction.

Costacurta's formulation holds up because it refuses the false choice. The stadium can be both an icon and unfit for its purpose. Conceding the second does not require denying the first.

Sources and further reading

• The Guardian's interview with Alessandro Costacurta marking San Siro's centenary, published in its football section, which supplied the reported detail used here.
• Italian cultural heritage legislation and the published guidance of the national and regional heritage authorities, for how protection orders on publicly owned buildings are assessed and applied.
• Published municipal records and council proceedings on stadium land and concession arrangements, which set out how public ownership and club tenancy interact.
• Football finance reporting and club annual accounts, for the general structure of broadcast, commercial and matchday revenue streams referred to in this piece.