San Siro turns 100 this weekend. The stadium opened on 19 September 1926, and the birthday arrives with a strange double edge: it will not host football for much longer. Milan and Inter completed a joint purchase of the ground, and a surrounding parcel of land, from the city council at the end of 2025, and the two clubs plan to begin construction of a new stadium early next year.
Few people are better placed to talk about what is being left behind than Alessandro Costacurta. His first visit to San Siro did not last long. He was 12, his brother was 14, and the pair went with their father to watch what he believes was Milan against Bologna. The ground was not covered back then, and a downpour arrived. After a quarter of an hour, his father called it: they had to go.
He had grown up in the province of Varese, north of Milan, as a Varese supporter – it was his brother who followed Milan. A year after that aborted first trip, Costacurta was recruited into Milan’s academy, and he went on to play 663 times for the first team, winning Serie A seven times and the European Cup five, either side of its rebrand as the Champions League. Only his fellow defenders Paolo Maldini, with 902 appearances, and Franco Baresi, with 719, have played more for the Rossoneri. Many of Costacurta’s came alongside them, in a back four he formed with Maldini, Baresi and Mauro Tassotti.
His verdict on the building itself is fond but unsentimental. “San Siro is not a modern stadium,” he says. “It’s an icon, it’s incredibly beautiful, but it’s not functional.” He lists the shortcomings: too few elevators, dated lounges, and toilets infamous enough that a mention of them draws a sheepish grin. “That’s the first thing I wanted to say!”
The replacement is to be a multifunction venue designed by the architect firms Foster + Partners and Manica, with the area around the stadium regenerated with new retail and hospitality facilities. A new stadium has been a central pillar of the vision set out by Milan’s owners, RedBird, since their takeover in 2022, and the project is shared with Inter, Milan’s co-tenants. Construction is intended to be completed in 2031, in time to host games at Euro 2032, and it is expected to give both clubs revenue streams that help them compete on a continental stage at a moment when Serie A, like other leagues, has struggled to match the Premier League’s earning power.
That the two clubs are building together says something about a rivalry that is less bitter than many derbies elsewhere. “Milan is a particular thing,” Costacurta says. “It’s rare to breathe such friendly air when you go to different derbies around the world. There are chants of course, but also a lot of mixing between fans. And when I was playing, between players too.” The camaraderie was visible in 2005, when Inter’s Marco Materazzi and Milan’s Rui Costa waited together for flares on the pitch to be cleared during their Champions League quarter-final second leg. Even so, beating Inter mattered more than most results – particularly when Milan were officially the away side. Costacurta remembers a 6-0 win in May 2001: “At 4-0 we could see their fans walking out.”
What makes San Siro distinctive, in his telling, is the steepness of the stands. He contrasts them with the shallow angle of many other grounds and points his fingers straight downward to show the drop. “The first time I was out beside the pitch as a ballboy – which everyone does when you get to the youth team – it made me almost afraid. It felt like all those people were going to fall on top of me.” Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu, he concedes, is a little like that, “but still, like San Siro? I don’t think so.” Rome has its own way of drawing a crowd close, the anthem sung before kick-off at Roma, which he calls beautiful – “but it’s different. At San Siro, when you’re up there at the top, it’s like you’re in a tower above the pitch, leaning out of the window.”
The ground was the realisation of a vision held by Piero Pirelli, then Milan’s president, for a football-specific stadium unlike anything else in Italy at the time. There was no running track, only four stands with capacity for 35,000 spectators, and Pirelli was said to have taken inspiration from stadiums in England. San Siro was also a product of its setting: stables, hay barns and storage space were incorporated below the stands to serve the horse racing track next door. Milan’s city council bought the stadium in 1935 and expanded it with connecting sections between the stands. Inter joined Milan as co-tenants in 1947, before a second tier was added and opened in 1955. In 1980 the stadium was renamed for Giuseppe Meazza, the two-time World Cup-winning Italy midfielder who spent 14 seasons with Inter and two with Milan – though it has remained San Siro to most fans.
The final third tier, with a roof at last to shield supporters from the rain, was completed before the 1990 World Cup. Costacurta played the first match after its opening, a 1-0 defeat in the return leg of Milan’s Coppa Italia final against Juventus. What he remembers most is not the noise but the pitch. “They hadn’t understood how to manage the airflow with the extra tier, and the pitch was really ugly. For a year and a half, our pitch was the worst in Europe.” Milan adapted well enough to go on a record-breaking 58-game unbeaten run in Serie A from May 1991 to March 1993, and Costacurta suspects the surface ended up helping them. “I think it was a disadvantage for visiting teams that came to San Siro,” he says. “And San Siro is a stadium that puts a lot of pressure on, there’s this incredible noise.”
He switches into English for emphasis: “Roar!” It is loud enough, he notes, that hearing someone speaking beside you becomes difficult, and managers bellowing from the touchline are engaged in a largely futile act. “They hope they can pass a message down the line but, trust me, the message almost never gets there.” The fans, though, found ways of getting their own messages across. San Siro still had standing sections when he made his first-team debut in 1987, with spectators holding the railing beside the pitch and leaning out to shout. Coming through the youth team spared him the harshest insults; what he got were jibes in Milanese dialect, amusing ones, including “pè de ghisa” – iron foot – a reference to a level of technical ability he had not yet reached. He won them over eventually, laughing at the memory of the “rubbish” chant they made for him: “It was just ‘Billy! Billy! Vai! Vai! Vai!’ The worst chant of any player at Milan.” On the day of his final game at San Siro, in May 2007, thousands waited outside the stadium to thank him.
Some trace of the old ground will survive the rebuild: Milan and Inter have said that part of the old stadium will be preserved within the new development. Costacurta draws encouragement from Arsenal, a club he came to follow over the years while admiring Arsène Wenger’s teams from afar, and their move away from Highbury, which has since been converted into apartments. He played there in the European Super Cup – a goalless draw, with Milan winning the return leg 2-0 at San Siro. “Great. Beautiful. Iconic,” he says of Highbury. “I think everyone suffered the change at first, but the Emirates is great now. So why not?”