Featured image credit: UD Almería
Spanish Segunda División club UD Almería has presented plans for a new sports city complex, which will feature a 3,555-capacity stadium.
The complex will be located in the El Toyo area of the city and will cover 132,000 square metres. It will cost €13m (£10.8m/$13.3m) to construct.
As well as the indoor stadium, the space will feature up to eight football pitches, a gym, offices and two buildings to house Almería’s first team and youth team. The complex will be surrounded by garden areas and will promote sustainability.
Almería is owned by Turki Alalshikh, chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority. Alalshikh has planned on building a sports city complex for Almería since he purchased the club back in 2019.
A presentation was held at UD Almería Stadium to unveil the plans, with the event attended by Mayor of Almería María del Mar Vázquez.
“In order to promote its development, and once it has been verified that all the previous conditions of capacity for job creation and level of investment are met, the City Council is going to launch for the first time the Project Accelerator Unit to speed up the administrative processing of the project as much as possible,” the mayor said.
Mohammed El Assy, Almería chief executive, added: “It is a project that would have been impossible to carry out without the investment and commitment of Turki Alalshikh due to its magnitude. Finding the right land, buying it, going through the entire bureaucratic process… has not been easy.
“Quite the contrary, especially when Almería also faced other challenges, such as promotion to the First Division, the transfer and remodelling of the stadium, and the setting up of a hospitality complex. Once the Ciudad Deportiva has been presented, we will soon hold the ceremony to lay the first stone. Then we will be able to move forward with the execution times.”
The plans will be presented at the City Council’s plenary session later this month as a ‘project of action’.
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