Roma Preparing Centenary and Pietralata Stadium, Club Officials Say

What happened

Roma is preparing to mark its 100th anniversary in 2027, with planning for the centenary having begun two years in advance, the club's chief business officer Michael Gandler said at the Social Football Summit at the Allianz Stadium in Turin, as reported by Corriere dello Sport. Gandler said the club had spent the past twelve months advancing work on the centenary and on the process for its new stadium, and described the current period as the ideal moment to open talks with clients and sponsors in order to build long and lasting projects.

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Gandler, speaking at the summit, said Roma had been fortunate to carry forward the centenary operations over the last year, and that the same period had also seen the stadium process develop. He framed the timing as one in which "the doors are more open" for commercial discussions, according to the report.

On partnerships, Gandler said the world of sponsorship is changing rapidly, including the traditional assets available to sponsors. He said Roma had launched a platform to create alternative forms of communication, citing Q8 Radio as an example, with the club granting its radio rights to the partner. He described the arrangement as a win for the club, the partner and the fans.

Gandler also spoke about the club's relationship with its local support, saying that after spending several years elsewhere in Italy he had come to see the Rome market as very particular and its fans as special. He said the club tries to listen to them and to bring them its experiences and the best business practices, adding that it invests in creating relationships and engaging its people. He said he has worked in Italy for more than ten years and considers himself fortunate to be at Roma.

Lucia Bernabé, Roma's head of institutional relations, also appeared at the summit and discussed relations with institutions over the new stadium at Pietralata. She said the project involves building a stadium in an already populated area, and that the first institutions are the citizens themselves, who need to understand that the club will not damage their territory but improve it. According to Bernabé, the stadium will bring new roads and infrastructure and help improve the whole neighbourhood.

Bernabé attributed the project to the vision and will of the Friedkin family, which she said had chosen to make an extraordinary investment not only for the future of AS Roma but also for that of the city. She described it as a long-term commitment going well beyond the sporting dimension and showing the ownership's intention to leave a concrete and lasting legacy to Rome and its citizens. In the case of Pietralata, she said, the choice fell on a central area that had not yet been given the opportunity to feel central: a strategic part of the city, connected by various infrastructure and close to the centre, but which did not yet feel central as a neighbourhood.

To make the relationship work, Bernabé said it was essential to create a working table and assign precise roles to every party involved in the project. She said the club and the administrations had done exactly that, defining who should do what, so that each had an objective and a role based on their competences, and that the goal had been reached through discussion among all these parties.

On stadium design, Bernabé said planning is not only about the architecture of the stadium itself but about awareness of the club's history and the values that hold it together. She said a stadium should not be defined solely as a place where a match is played for 90 minutes each week, but as the home of a football team and the home of the fan, and must be built as such. She said the focus must be on the experience offered to fans and on the feelings they have for the team. As a concrete example, she said the curva of the new stadium will be an imposing one, the largest in Europe, and that the study and design of this curva stem from the wish to create a kind of embrace of the team, so that the fan can embrace their club.