Roma president: 'Catastrophic' if city rejects new stadium plans

City authorities would cause "catastrophic" damage to Roma and all of Italian football if they reject a long-existing plan to build a privately owned stadium in the southern part of the capital, club president James Pallotta said.

A meeting on Friday between Rome mayor Virginia Raggi and Giallorossi general manager Mauro Baldissoni will determine whether they can go ahead with stadium development.

"We expect a massively positive result from the meeting on Friday," Pallotta said in a statement. "The alternative would be catastrophic for the future of AS Roma, Italian football, the city of Rome, and quite frankly for future business in Italy."

Baldissoni said €60 million has already been put into the Stadio della Roma project, with final investment figures reaching €2 billion.

But the location of the building site, Tor di Valle, has become a political battleground between Roma and the city council. A superintendency ruling determined that a hippodrome built in the area in 1962 has too much historical value to be demolished, according to Italian news agency ANSA.

Defending its position earlier this month, Roma stated that previous talks with the municipality never mentioned the need to keep in tact a decrepit horse-racing track that is "covered in asbestos," and that the timing of the ruling was "particularly odd."

The hippodrome was closed in 2013.

The new stadium has been sidelined for years, with Raggi, who was elected as Rome's first female mayor last June, failing to provide explicit approval for the project.

Roma submitted plans for a scaled-down version of the new stadium, and promised to redevelop a section of the hippodrome to preserve its "historical memory."

The Stadio della Roma had been slated to open by August 2019.