Serie A newcomers Carpi may need to upgrade stadium
Wednesday 29 April 2015 16:16, UK
Carpi have been promoted to Serie A for the first time - but questions remain over whether their tiny stadium will be suitable for the top-flight.
Situated in a small town in the Emilia region of northern Italy near Modena, Carpi - who play in a town with a population of only 70,000 - went from the equivalent of Conference to the Italian top flight in just six years.
However, questions loom over their Sandro Cabassi stadium which holds only 4,144 supporters, as Serie A teams need to have a stadium that holds at least 20,000.
Sky Italia’s Valentina Fass told Sky Sports News HQ: “There will be a meeting this week with the town Mayor and football club to decide what can be done.
“There are a few options - to enhance the current stadium with 10,000 which will call for quite an important investment, or like Spanish team ABA when they got promoted to La Liga, they kept their old stadium and brought it up to 6,000 seats. Carpi are going to try and convince Serie A league to do the same.
“The alternatives are to play in Parma, Sassuolo or Modena, but sharing stadiums is quite complex.”
Although the team is virtually unchanged from the team that came up from Italian Conference football, Fass believes the team will have to change.
“In Italy there’s a saying that if a team wins, you don’t change it, which is true until it comes to Serie B. In Serie A you need a very strong team, you need Serie A players.
"Carpi will probably keep their goalkeeper Gabriel Vasconcelos Ferreira who is on loan from AC Milan and might keep a couple of other players.
"But they will mostly sell the current players and get players who play at the good level in Serie B or new players on loan in Serie A."
One thing for certain is Carpi will need a big investment in their future.
“Sassuolo was promoted last year but they had a lot of money being put in,” said Vass.
“At the moment there won’t be as much money put into Carpi but Carpi is in a very important area in Italy, it’s the main centre for knitwear, so there’s a lot of important companies here.
“So who knows, somebody might want to put their name on Carpi!”
