Fiorentina’s Stadium Saga Another Twist In A Predictable Tale

In a country where the love of football runs as deep as food, art and wine, Italy sure know how to stifle their teams when it relates to modernisation.

Italy’s lack of stadium building (or even renovating) over the past half a century is infamous at this point: projects are planned, presented and then magically evaporate into the ether. Most presentations end up being just that – presentations.

All meet fierce opposition from local councils or governments. Such is the revolving door of Italian politics that one mayor will sign off on a stadium project in any given city, fast forward a year or two later and the same city will have a different mayor with a different agenda, demanding amendments. Rinse and repeat.

Roma and the Milan two’s tussles with their respective councils over the past decade are well known. Roma were stuck in a political quagmire for so many years that they eventually abandoned their Stadio della Roma project at Tor di Valle once the Friedkin Group took control of the club from James Pallotta. Their new project in the Pietralata area of the city appears to have received a greater reception due to the Friedkin’s wanting to build only a stadium.

Sadness washed over the football world when it was announced that San Siro, one of the great cathedrals of the game, was due to be knocked down as both Milan and Inter wanted to build a modern stadium on the site of the legendary arena by 2026.

Neutral fans flocked to San Siro to witness a game live before it ‘got knocked down’. Yet anyone with a keen eye on how things operate in Italy knew that both moving into a new-and-improved San Siro by 2026 was utopian stuff. Both teams have been repeatedly stifled by the Milanese council, and we can safely assume at this stage that only a successful Euro 2032 bid by Italy will be the key to unlocking the prolonged stalemate between both clubs and the government.

The latest stadium saga to play out concerns Fiorentina’s Stadio Artemio Franchi.

La Viola was bought by Rocco Commisso in the summer of 2019. Commisso has, like Pallotta before him, found the grinding cogs and the byzantine system of Italian bureaucracy hard to stomach at times.

Commisso wanted to build a stadium for Fiorentina but, like in Rome and Milan, was continually stifled. The Franchi, so old that it’s now passed into law as a national monument and despite heaps of concrete falling down inside the stadium was to be saved, went the thinking.

Commisso relented and focused on building Viola Park which, when finished this year, will be the most impressive men and women’s training facility in the country.

But the Artemio Franchi was to get the renovation it so badly needed, but not through Commisso. Dario Nardella, mayor of Florence, had initially managed to secure €95m ($104m) for the Franchi as part of the EU’s post-pandemic recovery fund for Italy, which amounted to some €190bn ($209bn).

The idea was to upgrade the Franchi using public money, rather than with Commisso’s private money. Plans had been drawn up, presented and signed off over the last 18 months. Fiorentina had been told they would have to play away from the stadium for the better part of two years, which naturally didn’t go down well with the club.

“It’s unthinkable that Fiorentina can play away from the Franchi for two years and away from Florence,” said the club’s sporting director Joe Barone. “I’ve never seen a situation of this kind in the world of football.”

No one in charge of the EU’s post-Coronavirus recovery fund had seemingly taken notice of the fact that Italy was preparing to use public money to renovate two crumbling stadiums (Venice the other). Yet eventually, someone woke up and objected.

The Italian government requested the third tranche of the funds, amounting to €19bn ($20bn), be released by the EU, allowing Nardella to begin work on upgrading the Franchi.

Yet the EU is now taking the hard-line with Florence, and Italy, telling the country that the funds won’t be released unless the projects in Florence and Venice are taken off the table. The Franchi renovation was presented within Italy’s package of ‘urban regeneration of metropolitan cities’ that was pitched to the EU. The idea being that Italy would use €200m of EU money to revitalise ‘urban degraded areas’ around the country.

Campo di Marte, the area in which the Franchi is located, certainly doesn’t fit into that category, the EU reasoned. Even though the stadium itself is a crumbling heap of concrete with poor sight-lines from the curva ends, Campo di Marte is one of Florence’s most expensive areas, and not what one would describe as ‘degraded’.

An official decision is expected at the end of this month from the EU, but it is more than likely that the funds won’t be released until the Franchi is out of the picture, and so it leaves Nardella with a stadium project with no money.

But the irony of the situation is that the city has an owner in Commisso who wants to invest in a new stadium with private money, yet isn’t allowed or is subjected to ludicrous levels of red tape, while the mayor wants to use public money to rejuvenate a stadium that is so worn out that €95m likely wouldn’t cover it.

What happens to the Franchi project over the coming months remains to be seen. Like all other stadium projects in Italy, only a successful Euro 2032 bid can fasten development. All those projects gathering dust in architect drawers up and down the country may actually see the light of day once again.

UEFA
EFA
will decide who wins the right to host the tournament towards the end of the year, with Turkey at this stage the only other bidder in the frame.

At a point where the Italian game is falling further and further behind the Premier
PINC
League and even La Liga in terms of stadium revenue, the country needs to host Euro 2032. Because with only five stadiums built or renewed in the country over the past 15 years, it’s been proven there is a lack of will by governments and councils up and down the country to make it easy on clubs outside of major international tournaments.

But much like with San Siro getting knocked down, Fiorentina won’t be playing away from their home any time soon.