Between the unknown Covid and the registration node. Salernitana fans live days of hectic waiting, waiting to understand what the future of their favorite team will be. And not only from the corporate point of view, from which the certainty of taking part in the next Serie A tournament inevitably passes through the FIGC’s own admission, but also for the possibility of being able to return to crowd the stadium with the name of a prince in the maximum national football championship after 22 years. Many supporters, in fact, have never seen the tournament that takes the name of the first letter of the alphabet, except in time-grained videos on YouTube, or in some old memory handed down by those who are a few years older. It goes without saying that expectations are inevitably very high, especially on the possibility of returning to the stadium after a championship and a half spent cheering on the sofa. Many, many requests have been received by the president of the Salernitana Club Coordination Center, Riccardo Santoro, who patiently records personal data, but he cannot do much more.
Yes, because the real game is played on the vaccination campaign and on the progress of infections at Covid, an invisible enemy that has closed the doors to every type of sporting event and that only a few days ago has allowed the Government to be able to try some timid signal of return to normal. Numbers, however, too small to satisfy the passion of a square celebrating for the return to Serie A. The last time, in the ’98 -’99 season, there were 28 thousand fans who braved long queues and burning sun to sign the season ticket, leaving around 8 thousand tickets available to the rest of the fans to be grabbed from Sunday to Sunday (the seasonal average was over 32 thousand spectators).
At present, the stadium with the prince’s name is approved for a capacity of around 26 thousand seats, numbers that in “normal” times would easily go sold out in practically every internal match of the grenade formation. There is, however, to take into account the slow return to normality due to a virus that has not yet been completely defeated, and which will slow down or even cancel the start of a “classic” subscription campaign. There is talk of a reopening, starting from the next Serie A championship, scheduled for August 22, with about 50% of the capacity, perhaps with a preferential lane for those who have already received the vaccine and will be equipped with a “Green Pass”, but a lot will depend on the choices of the government.
While the Municipality of Salerno is preparing to stipulate the agreement of use for the sports facility in via Allende, among the projects there is also that of significantly increasing the number of spectators to be welcomed at the Arechi, the company also does the math with what could have been and which inevitably will not be. Several million euros less, but above all a brake on the potential of a square, which up to the definitive break with Claudio Lotito, had exceeded almost half of the Serie A teams, even playing in cadetries, and collecting more disappointments than satisfactions. Now, however, there is the dream of being able to return as soon as possible to fill your stadium with grenade and make a grenade basin. The same, where, 23 years ago, big names like Juventus, Inter and Lazio fell.
Stefano Masucci