Italy has submitted its stadium bid for the 2032 European Championship, which it will co-host with Turkey, on time. Out of the 14 venues, only five will be chosen to host the tournament, but there is something wrong with the list: four of the proposed venues do not yet exist and there is no guarantee that they will be ready within a year of the start of the competition, as required by UEFA. Bologna, Cagliari, Roma-Pietralata and the new San Siro in Milan are only projects and the construction sites have not yet started, but they already have very tight deadlines that may not be enough.
The European Championship will take place in almost six years, a period long enough to build four new stadiums from scratch, but the reality is that Italy's candidacy is currently based on projects that have not even started. In the meantime, UEFA will have to verify the file and only then will the FIGC be able to officially select the five Italian host cities.
Four stadiums still to be built for Euro 2032
On paper, Italy has 14 candidacies, but in reality there are 10, because 4 of the stadiums presented in the dossier have not yet been built. The case of Bologna is the most delicate: the project of the new facility was added to the dossier shortly before its submission, because BolognaFiere and Bologna FC have only recently reached an agreement for a new stadium with 35 thousand seats, with an estimated investment of around 300 million euros. The deadline foresees the spring of 2031 as the completion of the works, very close to the European Championship, but there is no certainty that the calendar will be respected and the space for possible delays has been reduced to a minimum.
The new San Siro should be built by 2031
In Cagliari the project is more advanced, but the construction site has not yet started. The works should start in March 2027 and should last three years, provided that there are no obstacles along the way. The deadlines are very similar to those of the new San Siro, which should be completed in 2031: in the case of the Milan plant there is a very strict planning to respect the established deadline, with the risk that any delay could compromise the candidacy of the plant, especially since the works have started within the area where it will be built, but for the construction site it will have to wait at least until the beginning of the new year.
Finally, there is the Pietralata project, presented by Roma, which just a few days ago received the green light from the Services Conference, an essential administrative step before the start of the construction site. But the green club is also quite behind, because it will have to present the final project and develop the tenders, with the aim of adapting to the deadlines of Milan and Cagliari, completing the work by 2031. On paper everything works and the deadlines have been drawn up, but it is a real race against time to be ready: the main dilemma is how reliable the dates set for the completion of the four projects are, on which the FIGC is basing everything for the next European Championship, to enable the national teams to play in new and modern stadiums, but which risk being excluded from the competition due to lack of time.
