Dom, 15 Nov 2026From the idea put forward by President Ferrero to the economic opportunities of a purpose-built venue: capacity, revenue and financial sustainability at the heart of a project that could mark a turning point for Juventus Women.DiEleni Stefania KalapodaCondividi l'articoloThe Expert's View(Foto: Claudio Villa/Getty Images)Article written by Eleni Stefania Kalapoda, a New York-based architect and urban designer specializing in the design of sports, entertainment, and hospitality venues, and a member of the Autodesk Advisory Council. Throughout her career, she has collaborated with the Renzo Piano Building Workshop team on the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center project and worked at Foster + Partners, the architecture firm commissioned alongside MANICA to design the new San Siro stadium for FC Internazionale and AC Milan.When Gianluca Ferrero told Juventus shareholders on 3 November that it “would be wonderful” to build a second stadium near Turin for the women’s team and Next Gen, he gave voice to an idea whose hour has come. The club, he said, has the will and the idea; what it does not yet have is an executive project. That is precisely where the most consequential decisions now lie, for a venue for women’s football succeeds or falters long before the first stone is laid, in the choices made about its size, its use and its economics.Italy already knows the appetite is there. In March 2019, 39,027 spectators filled the Allianz Stadium for Juventus against Fiorentina, then a national record for the women’s game. Four years later, 39,454 gathered at the Stadio Olimpico to watch Roma meet Barcelona in the Champions League. Serie A Women has been fully professional since 2022. The question is no longer whether Italians will come to watch women play football, but how a club can welcome them every matchday, not only on the great occasions.Size is strategyThe first lesson from abroad is that the right stadium for a women’s team is rarely the largest one available. A crowd of 4,000 is a triumph in a ground of 6,000 and a disappointment in a bowl of 41,000. Atmosphere is a commercial asset in its own right: it sells season tickets, it lends itself beautifully to broadcast and photography, and it offers sponsors the most valuable image in sport, a full house. Barcelona understood this when it made the 6,000-seat Estadi Johan Cruyff the everyday home of its women’s team, reserving the club’s largest venue for the occasions that can fill it.Eleni KalapodaKansas City went further still. In March 2024, the Kansas City Current opened CPKC Stadium, the first stadium in the world built specifically for a professional women’s team: around 11,500 seats, privately financed at a cost of roughly $117 million, with season tickets sold out from its very first season. Its success owes little to spectacle and a great deal to precision. Sightlines are intimate, concourses generous, and every space was shaped around the people who truly attend women’s football, from young families to groups of friends, rather than adapted from a template conceived for someone else.For Juventus, a capacity of 8,000 to 12,000 seats, with stands that can be extended or reconfigured, would allow the club to grow its audience rather than chase it. A venue planned in phases protects capital today and leaves room for the demand the club is so clearly cultivating.Shared by design, not by compromiseMr Ferrero’s instinct to pair the women’s team with Next Gen is commercially astute, provided the building is conceived for both from the very first sketch. Two squads double the matchdays, and with them the hospitality, catering, retail and naming-rights value that a stadium can carry. The difference between a shared venue that thrives and one that merely tolerates its tenants lies in the details: dressing rooms of equal standard, medical and recovery suites designed around female athletes rather than retrofitted, flexible branding that lets each team feel truly at home, and a fixture calendar coordinated with broadcasters so that neither side inherits the leftover slots.The finest contemporary venues also earn their keep between matches. A training and performance centre attached to the stadium, community pitches, a club museum and conference spaces can transform a building used perhaps thirty days a year into one that is alive almost every day. That is what makes the investment defensible to a board, and it is also what makes the stadium a genuine piece of the city rather than a closed box at its edge.Making the numbers workA venue of this scale need not be a burden on the balance sheet. Its revenue model can be assembled from several dependable streams:naming rights, which for a purpose-built women’s stadium carry a rare and marketable story;premium hospitality, which smaller venues can deliver with greater intimacy than vast arenas;year-round income from training, events and community use.Italy also possesses a public lender dedicated to precisely this kind of project, the Istituto per il Credito Sportivo e Culturale, whose mission is to finance sporting infrastructure. Combined with a phased construction programme, such tools allow a club to build what it needs today, prove the demand, and expand with confidence tomorrowProximity is part of the productBoth teams currently play outside Turin. Bringing them closer to the city is not a sentimental gesture; it is a revenue decision. Attendance at women’s matches is highly sensitive to travel time, and the supporters who sustain a women’s club week after week are often local: schools, youth teams, families who can reach the ground by tram or train. A site well served by public transport, ideally linked to the club’s existing facilities, would do more for ticket sales than almost any marketing campaign.An Italian benchmarkItaly has every ingredient needed to set the European standard: a fully professional league, record crowds already on the books, and clubs with the brand strength to invest. Juventus, which helped prove the audience in 2019, is ideally placed to show what a purpose-built home for the women’s game can deliver: full stands, a stronger matchday economy and an enduring bond with the next generation of supporters.The idea is there, as Mr Ferrero said. The opportunity now is to turn it into a project shaped from the first sketch around the athletes and the audience it will serve. Conceived with care, a stadium of her own would be no mere cost of supporting women’s football. It would be among the soundest investments the club could make.Developed by 3x1010