MILAN — The Olympic host city is home to three great cathedrals: the Duomo, a basilica so spectacular it took six centuries to complete; La Scala, the world’s most famous opera house and “the universal drawing-room for all the society of Milan,” as the novelist Mary Shelley once wrote.
And then there’s Stadio Giuseppe Meazza, commonly known as San Siro, on Milano’s western edge, a stadium so iconic it’s been called La Scala del Calcio, La Scale of football.
“San Siro is the history of football, the most important arena in Italy,” said Leonardo Bonucci, who played 121 times for Italy. “Stepping into San Siro always has an effect on you.”
International Olympic Committee officials and local organizers are banking that San Siro will have an impact on the world’s athletes and a global audience as the stadium opens the Milano Cortina Olympics Friday night, a Winter Games that come at a pivotal time for the Olympic movement.
“They’re ready to put on a show,” IOC president Kirsty Coventry said. “It’s going to be a beautiful show.”
San Siro has served as a stage for Maradona and Maldini, Marley, Dylan and Springsteen, Messi and Taylor Swift. The stadium has been home to the 1934 and 1990 World Cups, the 1989 European Championships, five European Cup/UEFA Champions League finals and the most attractive and groundbreaking soccer team of the 1980s and 1990s, a side so dominant and divine the Italian media dubbed them “the Immortals” and “the Invincibles.”
“There’s a natural mystic blowing through the air,’ Bob Marley said as he stepped to the microphone to open San Siro’s first ever concert in June 1980.
San Siro holds such a special place not only in the history of soccer but in Italian culture that it has even been the topic of film and pop songs.
How is it that you don’t remember?
We were one-hundred-thousand at the stadium that day
I was an Inter fan, you a Milan supporter
From one side to the other I smiled to you and you said yes!
The sense of nostalgia in Adriana Celentano’s 1967 hit record is no longer shared by city officials or the two soccer giants who have shared San Siro since 1947, AC Milan and Inter Milan.
Friday’s opening ceremony is likely the last time San Siro will take center stage at a major world event. AC Milan and Inter last November finalized a $232.8 million purchase of the stadium from the city, the first step toward lowering the final curtain on football’s La Scala.
San Siro will be demolished in either 2031 or 2032 depending on the completion of a $1.4 billion new state of the art stadium next door for Inter and AC Milan designed by Sir Norman Foster, who created the new Wembley Stadium, and Manica, the Kansas City architecture firm that designed Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas for the NFL’s Raiders and San Francisco’s Chase Center for the NBA’s Golden State Warriors.
“San Siro had its time,” Milano mayor Giuseppe Sala said. “Milan must be modern.”
AC Milan and Inter officials said the stadium’s purchase and the demolition of San Siro represent a “strategic milestone that reflects the shared ambition of AC Milan and Inter … for long-term sporting success and value-enhancing investment to support the clubs’ sustainable growth.” Specifically, the clubs, echoing their Serie A rivals, need a stadium that will generate greater revenue streams through corporate suites and sponsorship opportunities to try and catch up with teams in the economic powerhouse that is England’s Premier League.
Construction on Nuovo Stadio Milano is scheduled to start next year and is expected to be completed in time to host the 2032 European Championships.
The clubs basically forced the city’s hand with the threat of building outside of Milan.
“There is a very long discussion with Inter and AC Milan that is based on the fact that we, as an administration, cannot obstruct the idea of building a new stadium,” Sala told reporters. “If the teams were to go somewhere else, we will look really stupid, with an empty San Siro with cobwebs.”
It’s a sad vision for Italy’s largest stadium (80,018) and with its red beams one of global football’s most recognizable and dynamic venues.
“When you see Giuseppe Meazza Stadium (this is the correct name), it’s hard not to be left out of breath. When it is illuminated it seems a spaceship landed in a residential area,” a British journalist wrote in advance of the 1990 World Cup. “It could face the Death Star and it would win. Yes, it’s that impressive.”
“San Siro is a stadium that tastes like football, ” said Alessandro Nesta, who played on Italy’s 2006 World Cup winning side and for AC Milan from 2002 to 2012.
AC Milan is known to its fans as the Rossoneri for the team’s iconic red and black vertical striped jerseys and the Red Devils, a nickname assigned the squad by Herbert Kilpin, the British ex-pat who founded the Milan Foot-Ball and Cricket Club in 1899.
“We will be a team of devils,” Kilpin said. “Our colours will be red like fire and black like the fear we will invoke in our opponents.”
Eventually the club outgrew Arena Civica, the stadium near the city’s center that was as renowned as a track and field facility as it was a football venue. AC Milan opened the stadium Nuovo Stadio Calcistico San Siro in 1926 in the San Siro district near a horse track that also belonged to the Pirelli family, the soccer club’s owners. At the time, it was one of the few major European stadiums that didn’t have an oval running track around it. The venue was renamed Giuseppe Meazza Stadium, in honor of a hero of Italy’s 1934 and 1938 World Cup winning teams who played for both AC Milan and Inter.
The stadium was closed during World War II from 1941 to 1945 in part because of an electricity shortage that prevented the trams from being able to transport fans. Instead, the San Siro was used as a military storage space for trucks and jeeps.
In 1947, Inter moved from Arena Civica in the city’s center to San Siro. Imagine the Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers in that same era sharing Yankee Stadium or Ebbets Field.
AC Milan in 1963, led by its matinee idol star forward Gianni Rivera, became the first Italian team to win the European Cup.
A year later, Inter, the Nerazzurri to its fans for the club’s blue and black veritcal striped jerseys, succeeded their rivals as champions of Europe and then defended the European Cup in a San Siro final against Benfica. That Inter squad would also win two Intercontinental Cups, essentially the world club championship, and in 1967 reach a third European Cup final, losing to Glasgow’s Celtic, earning the name Grande Inter.
But the San Siro’s greatest team, indeed one of the greatest club sides in soccer history, was the AC Milan squad of the late 1980s and early to mid 1990s bought and paid for by the team’s owner, the flamboyant and controversial billionaire media and real estate tycoon and later Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who purchased the club out of bankruptcy in 1986.Berlusconi spared no expense in rebuilding the club, signing Dutch superstars Marco van Basten, Frank Rijkaard and Ruud Gullit, to go with Italy national team starters midfield workhorse Roberto Donadoni, defenders Franco Baresi, Alessandro Costacurta and youngster Paolo Maldini, arguably the greatest defender in the history of the game not named Beckenbauer.
Under manager Arrigo Sacchi, a former shoe salesman, AC Milan in 1987-88 won its first Serie A title in nine years and the following year won the European Cup, clobbering Steaua Bucharest 4-0 in the final. AC Milan repeated as European championships in 1989-90, defeating Benfica in the final. Another club wouldn’t successfully defend the European Cup (now the UEFA Champions League) until Real Madrid did so in 2017. The 1988-90 AC Milan, the so-called Immortals, has been selected as the best club side of all-time by a World Soccer magazine poll of international soccer experts.
A similar argument could be made the Invincibles, the AC Milan side that won Serie A in 1992, 1993 and 1994, going undefeated in the league for 58 matches, including the entire 1991-92 season, reaching three consecutive European Cup finals and winning in 1994 and 1995. Its 4-0 victory against Barcelona in the 1994 final is considered by many as the most dominant final performance in the tournament’s 70-year history.
It wasn’t just that AC Milan won everything, it was how the Rossoneri won. For decades, Italian soccer had been defined by catenaccio, a defense-first system and mentality. AC Milan didn’t play catenaccio. Instead the Rossoneri played with a style that reflected the man who owned the club and the city itself: bold, entertaining, attacking with flair.
“Milan played a very dynamic, aggressive, positive way of playing soccer that was unique,” said Luca Cottini, a Villanova modern Italian literature and culture professor. “Instead of being defensive they played with personality. It was very Milanese.”
And now San Siro, in essentially its global curtain call, will host an opening ceremony that organizers promise will be equally unique and entertaining; a night that will reflect the genius and flair of Armani and Maldini, a celebration of the Games and a stadium that will be remembered long after Italian football’s great starship is reduced to dust, its siren song forever playing in the hearts and minds of those graced its pitch and stage, and stood beneath its brilliant red beams.
How is it that you don’t remember?
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