Egyptian Premier League football club Al Ahly has reportedly confirmed a conceptual design for its new stadium in Cairo.
The club announced that the stadium will have 60,000 seats, which will make it the third largest stadium in Egypt after Borg El-Arab with an 86,000 capacity and the 74,100-seat Cairo International Stadium.
Design firm Populous will take the lead on Al Ahly’s project, which is the same architecture company that designed Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium and London’s Wembley Stadium.
The team has received the backing of investors for its new stadium construction project, with the support of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
Mohamed Zakaria Serageldin, a new board member for Al Ahly, said: “I already worked over the last year in developing a dynamic model that calculates the stadium costs, revenues and the land size. (In addition to) implementing the general needed inputs, like capacity of stadium, country, quality case, team ranking as fan base, average games per season played on the stadium. Moreover, the model includes option of adding roof, commercial area and parking to the stadium as a project.
“The model outputs the total cost of the stadium, revenues, cash flow, IRR and payback period and land size. The model is workable for 56 countries with a very high accuracy as in the validation process it was only like 2-4 per cent difference in terms of costs and revenues to the real existing stadiums when I validated it and tested it on the current stadiums.
“So at the end it’s considered as a quick validated feasibility analysis guide to owner/investor/consultant to know from the beginning if the proposed stadium project is viable or not.”
Al Ahly has played at a different stadium each season in recent years, with home venues including the Cairo International Stadium, Borg El-Arab, Petrosport and Al-Salam.
Images: Populous
