Manfredi: Napoli's Q8 stadium plan still just an idea

Mayor Manfredi gave his clearest account yet of the stand-off over Napoli's long-term home, speaking on the sidelines of the "Il bello del calcio" event at Palazzo Petrucci. Aurelio De Laurentiis wants a new, club-owned stadium in the Q8 area. The council wants to redevelop the Maradona. For now, Manfredi said, the two sides are still just talking.

The Q8 site, Manfredi explained, sits "at the centre of an industrial area where there are still very significant petroleum activities today", which makes any project there complex. If it becomes "something concrete, a real investment", the council would welcome it: "We accept all the major investments that are in the city's interest. I hope this idea of Aurelio's can also go ahead."

But the council's own priority is unambiguous. "We have the Maradona, and we will work on the Maradona to carry out a major redevelopment and bring it up to date," Manfredi said. The plan involves opening the third tier, which would add 10,000 seats, followed by work on the first tier, using the same method applied at other Italian grounds — Florence above all.

The basketball arena is already at the approvals stage

The basketball project is further along. Manfredi confirmed that for the new arena on the site of the old Mario Argento, "there has been a first proposal from the club" and the conferenza dei servizi — the formal process in which all the relevant public bodies give their approvals — is already under way. "Building an arena is not a walk in the park, it's a fairly complex thing," he said.

The council has already asked the club for "a series of additions" to make the project approvable, with the aim of closing the process by next spring. The project is tied to Matt Rizzetta, with whom the mayor said he is in contact "with a certain regularity": an arena designed for a team competitive "not only in Italy but in Europe", in what Manfredi called a sports market that is now "a global market".

In the background sits Napoli's bid to host Euro 2032. Funding for the bid dossier received final approval in recent days, and the council is now working through UEFA's requirements, which cover not just the stadium but transport, hospitality, the airport, security and connectivity.

Manfredi spoke of "a Napoli on the move in sport", pointing beyond the Mario Argento arena to another one planned for the centro direzionale (the city's business district), and said the city is also considering a dedicated athletics stadium in the Bagnoli area. The reason, he said, is that at the Maradona "it has never been possible to host an athletics event — the pitch itself can't be used for that".

What remains is the gap the mayor himself described without dressing it up: two different ideas about where Napoli will play in the years ahead, his and De Laurentiis's, running in parallel without meeting. The president is pushing for a stadium Napoli would own in the Q8 area; the council is answering with a Maradona refurbishment and a timetable — the conferenza dei servizi, spring as the horizon — that for now applies only to the basketball arena, not the football stadium. Until the Q8 project produces paperwork and deadlines like those already set for Rizzetta's arena, it remains a subject raised on the sidelines of a conference, not a building site with a schedule to measure.