San Siro, Shared and Still Heavy

San Siro began as AC Milan’s English-style ground

AC Milan president Piero Pirelli set the project in motion in 1925. Architects Ulisse Stacchini and Alberto Cugini designed a football-only venue without an athletics track, using four independent reinforced-concrete stands arranged close to the pitch. Construction took about 13 months, and the inaugural match on 19 September 1926 was a friendly derby won 6–3 by Inter.

The initial capacity was about 35,000. That first version matters because San Siro’s intimacy at pitch level was a design choice before later tiers made it monumental. AC Milan’s official stadium history records the original design, opening and construction timeline.

Expansion turned four stands into a concrete landmark

The City of Milan acquired the stadium in 1935 and expanded it with connecting curves, taking capacity to roughly 55,000. Inter began sharing the ground from the 1947/48 season. A second tier followed in the mid-1950s, moving San Siro away from four separate stands and toward the enclosed form supporters recognise today.

The next defining rebuild came for the 1990 World Cup. A third ring was added and supported by 11 cylindrical towers, with four towers also carrying the roof structure. The project lifted capacity to about 85,700 at the time and created the exterior silhouette that makes San Siro identifiable even without club colours.

Two clubs create two San Siro matchdays

The stadium is officially named Stadio Giuseppe Meazza and remains home to both AC Milan and Inter. It is shared, but it does not feel neutral. Each club changes the signage, colour, choreography and supporter geography, while the Derby della Madonnina puts both identities into the same match.

This is the venue’s most durable comparative advantage. Other elite clubs share city rivalries, and some have shared grounds temporarily, but few stadiums have accumulated so many high-level memories for two globally prominent clubs on the same site.

San Siro capacity on 10 July 2026

Official club pages publish slightly different current figures. Inter lists a capacity of 75,817 on its Stadio Giuseppe Meazza page, while AC Milan’s sector map lists 75,773 seats. The difference is small but worth preserving: saleable, licensed or configured capacities can vary, so an undated single number creates false precision.

The present ground has three rings and colour-coded sectors. AC Milan also identifies it as a UEFA category four stadium and notes that it hosted the 2001 and 2016 Champions League finals. Those events add neutral European history to the many Milan and Inter home nights.

What the new-stadium process actually means

AC Milan and Inter completed the acquisition of the San Siro/Meazza complex from the City of Milan on 5 November 2025 through Stadio San Siro S.p.A. That transaction changed the ownership baseline, but it did not mean the existing stadium immediately closed or that a replacement had already been built.

On 24 March 2026, the City of Milan announced the start of the procedure for adopting an implementation plan. The published concept separates the work into a first phase with a new stadium and partial demolition of the existing Meazza, followed by a second phase that would redevelop the preserved portion and surrounding area. The city said approvals were intended to support a construction start in the second half of 2027. Those are planning targets, not completed works; the dated status comes from the City of Milan’s March 2026 notice.

Why San Siro remains difficult to replace

San Siro’s ranking case combines features that are hard to reproduce in a new bowl: a football-only 1920s origin, visible layers from several construction eras, close lower-tier sightlines, a dramatic tower-and-roof profile and two club identities with separate European histories.

Its future may change, but uncertainty should not replace the present-tense evaluation. As of 10 July 2026, San Siro is still the working home of AC Milan and Inter. Any future venue will be judged against nearly a century of shared match memory, not only against capacity, hospitality or construction efficiency.