"I was not aware of the government's plan to invest in building a new sports stadium in Zagreb... But any new stadium should be built on the site of the current Maksimir Stadium," Zagreb mayor, Tomislav Tomasevic, said on Tuesday, in response to comments made a day earlier by the government spokesman who announced the plan out of the blue. 

“I have to admit that what was said yesterday was news to me,” Tomasevic told reporters on Tuesday in reference to government spokesman Marko Milic’s announcement that “the government, together with other stakeholders,” would launch the construction of a new stadium in Zagreb, and that it would also invest in other sport facilities across the country.

The main stadium in Zagreb, in the district of Maksimir, is a dilapidated structure formally owned by the city but used by the privately-owned Dinamo Zagreb football club. Plans to tear down the stadium and build a new one on the same site have been suggested for years by local authorities as well as football officials.

Tomasevic said that the management of the Dinamo football club have said they would be prepared to invest in building a new stadium so that public money would not need to be used for the project, without disclosing any figures.

However, the project would need investors for amenities adjacent to the stadium.

“The city has been asked to secure land and the option to help build various amenities, such as a hotel, an underground garage, and retail and office space,” Tomasevic said, without offering any estimate on the price of this.

He added that the city was “working on that” but that property rights over the plots of land required for the project – which is in part owned by the Catholic Church – had not been entirely resolved yet. “The city has been communicating intensively with the Church in that regard,” Tomasevic said.

He said that he was surprised by Milic’s announcement, because Dinamo had never said that there was a problem with money but rather with land rights. He went on to say that any investment in improving sports infrastructure would be welcome.

“I hope that some of those investments will also be made in other projects, such as renovating Zagreb’s Dom Sportova sports arena, the building of a new swimming pool in the western Spansko district, and renovating the city’s other stadium at Kranjceviceva Street,” he said.

With regard to the location for the new stadium, Tomasevic said that the existing “monstrosity” at Maksimir, which ate up around 800 million kuna (€106 million) to date in various modernization and upgrade attempts over the years, should be torn down and a new stadium built in the same location.

On top of its problems, the stadium, which has a maximum capacity of 36,000 and is the largest stadium in the country, was also damaged in the March 2020 Zagreb earthquake, which saw its east stand closed, reducing its capacity to under 25,000.