San Siro Turns 100, and a Former Defender Says Its Days Are Numbered

Milan's San Siro turns 100 this weekend, and the Guardian has marked the anniversary with an interview with Alessandro Costacurta, one of the defenders who spent a career in it. His verdict, as the paper reports it, is not sentimental: San Siro is an icon, incredibly beautiful, but not functional. The line carries the argument that has surrounded the ground for years, now attached to the man who knows its dressing rooms and its pitch.

The Guardian's piece frames the centenary against a demolition that it says will soon come. Costacurta's own introduction to the stadium, according to the interview, lasted 15 minutes of his first game there — he was not playing, but watching from the stands. The paper uses that detail to open a reflection on the noise and power of a ground it calls unique.

For readers outside Italy, the story is the familiar one about San Siro: a monument that the city and its two clubs have decided cannot be maintained as it is. The Guardian's headline settles on the contradiction rather than the ceremony — a hundred years of history, and a building judged unfit for the football that made it famous.