AC Milan and Inter’s idea for the demolition of San Siro: the old seats from the final season sold to season-ticket holders

Official documents raise the possibility of selling or transferring more than 60,000 seats at the Meazza to season-ticket holders. The demolition will last around 18 months and will follow ten operational phases.

A piece of San Siro could end up in season-ticket holders' homes. One option under consideration as part of the stadium's future partial demolition is to sell or give the old seats to the season-ticket holders from the last season played at the ground, so they can keep a physical part of it as a souvenir.

According to official documents on the project seen by the specialised website Calcio e Finanza, the papers also set out how the initiative could work.

Timescales

The operation should take place before the structural demolitions, on dedicated supervised days, with advance booking, sector-by-sector entry, staff oversight, assisted or controlled removal and tracked delivery of the seats. For now, it has not yet been decided whether the seats will be sold or given away free of charge. The documentation still describes it as an option under consideration. There is, however, already an initial simulation: from an indicative capacity of 75,817 seats, the plan envisages recovering 80%, equal to 60,654 seats. With each seat containing an average of around 4.5 kilograms of plastic, the operation would stop around 273 tonnes of plastic from entering the waste stream, according to Calcio e Finanza.

How San Siro will be demolished

Selling the seats would be only the first step in a far more complex project. The documents describe the demolition of the Meazza as an intervention of high technical, environmental and logistical complexity, not least because work will begin once the new stadium is already operational and must therefore coexist with fans arriving and leaving during events.

The plan is for a controlled demolition, while also limiting dust, noise and vibrations, recovering as much material as possible and reducing the number of lorries needed to take the rubble away.

Before work starts on the structures themselves, a strip-out is planned, meaning the selective removal of everything that can be dismantled separately. The listed components include air-conditioning systems, electrical systems, data networks, fire-prevention systems, water and sanitary systems, and refrigeration equipment, from which the refrigerant gases must first be recovered.

After that, the demolition itself will begin. The sequence set out in the documents provides for:

site set-up;

strip-out of building and plant elements;

demolition of the first ring;

demolition of the second ring;

demolition of the third ring;

removal of the concrete beams, which will be lowered and demolished on the ground;

removal of the steel beams, which will then also be worked on at ground level;

crushing by means of excavators;

subsequent processing through a plant;

final restoration of the area.

All of those activities are expected to take around 18 months.