AC Milan president Paolo Scaroni, in one of the meetings of the public debate relating to the new stadium project, spoke about the confrontation with Chelsea in this way:
"Yesterday, we lost against Chelsea. I don't want to talk about football but about money: Chelsea collects from the stadium more than double what Milan collects. I was at Stamford Bridge, I saw how it is structured which among other things is in the center of London, it certainly does not have the spaces of other facilities but in any case Chelsea earns much more than double the amount of Milan. Competing with clubs that have much higher financial means than ours makes us leave in a state of inferiority. Money is not everything, but it plays a very big role.We want to equip Milan and Inter with a stadium that allows us to have revenues and offer the spectacle that our European competitors have."
Scaroni added:
"There is incredible competitiveness in the world of football in Europe: the two Milanese clubs want to continue to be leaders in European football. It is not enough to be in Italy, we want Milan to play an important role in European football. But it is difficult without financial means to compete at those levels. When we tackled the stadium project, we faced all the hypotheses including restructuring it. We analysed the situation with experts and stadium technicians, one of the reasons we decided not to renovate it was that it would never have become the stadium that these years require for clubs like ours. San Siro as it is could not be renovated for the third time, so we discarded this hypothesis."
On the new stadium, Scaroni said:
"We put our experts to work, assuming a new stadium at San Siro that meets all the economic and financial requirements. We have 1.3 billion in investments in mind, an important figure that we would spend on public land with a capital that would be foreign, given that our two clubs are foreign-owned. And we will continue to have, while the stadium is being built, a competitive activity that will allow us to continue to have revenues and continue to maintain Milan as the capital of Italian football."
