New stadium plan presented
Panathinaikos’s administration yesterday unveiled detailed plans for the historic Greek club’s prospective new soccer stadium in downtown Athens, whose construction is expected to start early in the new year. Club officials hope the stadium – to be located in the downtown district of Votanikos, about a kilometer from Omonia Square – will be ready on time for Panathinaikos’s centennial year in 2008. Yiannis Vardinoyiannis, the club’s boss, told yesterday’s presentation that he expected all pre-construction details to be ready by the end of February. A timetable for the project’s construction and delivery will then be finalized, he said. «I’m not a specialist, but, technically speaking, I consider a year-and-a-half to be sufficient once [actual] work begins,» Vardinoyiannis said. The soccer stadium – a 40,000-capacity, fully-sheltered facility with double- and triple-layer stands – will be part of a complex that will also house the club’s basketball and volleyball divisions. Club officials said it will stand as Greece’s best stadium and one of the top in Europe. At yesterday’s presentation, the projected costs for the soccer stadium were slated at -83 million. Panathinaikos will be expected to pay -3.3 million to the City of Athens over a 20-year period. The entire complex has been budgeted at -127 million. The town hall’s board voted almost unanimously yesterday for the purchase of a 7.3-hectare plot of land for the project from the National Bank of Greece at the cost of -20 million euros, sources said. Earlier this month, the Finance Ministry pledged to provide the City of Athens with the project’s entire amount. Work also entails the transformation of Panathinaikos’s traditional base, the Apostolos Nikolaidis Stadium, into a park. It is situated in downtown Ambelokipi, one of the capital’s most congested neighborhoods.
