Ambitious plan to expand Boca Juniors stadium come to light

Article posted by Coliseum, December 19^th, 2019

Image: Proyecto Esloveno

The Argentinian Superliga football club Boca Juniors has been planning to expand its home Estadio Alberto J Armando Stadium (in Buenos Aires, Argentina), widely known as La Bombonera, for several years now. The plans have been revealed recently.

The venue underlined for its iconic VIP balconies will be done away with and few houses will also be knocked down. A new grandstand will come up which will accommodate 21,000 additional visitors. The new grandstand will take up the capacity of the stadium from 49,000 to 70,000 seats. The facility will also be completely roofed. Plans are in the offing to make it a 100,000 capacity venue.

The name has been given Proyecto Esloveno due to the nationality of Tomaz Camernik, the Slovenian architect behind the plans. The price tag of Proyecto Esloveno is expected to be around $70m (£54.7m/€63.5m). The budget only includes the construction of the grandstand which will take around 15 months. The roof is out of the scheme of things for now and will be installed at a later date.

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Proyecto Esloveno master plan would see a significant change to its current look. La Bombonera currently has a distinctive appearance due its single ‘flat’ stand being surrounded by three multi-tier stands.

Under the ‘Bombonera 100 mil’ proposal put forward by Argentina politician Christian Gribaudo, the stadium would effectively more than double in size from its current capacity of 49,000, making it one of the world’s largest venues.

The project has taken a cue from Spanish LaLiga club Athletic Bilbao’s transformation of its San Mamés Stadium, which opened in its current iteration in September 2013 following major revamp work that saw its pitch moved and rotated.

Gribaudo asserts that Boca has the financial wherewithal to take off the ground such a major project. Other proposals have also been laid bare for La Bombonera but, Gribaudo added, “I cannot say that one seems better than the other, but I can say that some will have capacity problems.”

“We need La Bombonera to hold more than 80,000 spectators that is why ours is the true expansion project. If you expand 10,000 more, you will have capacity problems again because Boca has 100,000 active members,” Gribaudo remarked.

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