New 42,000-seater may never happen for the Greek powerhouse. Future stadium for ‘The Greens’ is to be downscaled significantly, enough to lose highest category by UEFA’s standards.

Preparatory works started back in 2009 and have been stalled since. Less than half a month ago there were talks of using EU funds to carry on with the project, but nothing happened yet again, with previous plans of finding new private investors also failing.

Yesterday Greek website onsports.gr informed, that plans are now to be downscaled very significantly – literally halved. The new 42,000-seat stadium was supposed to cost €100 million (growing from initial €80M back in 2009), but now is to be cut back by €45-50 million.

What this means is not only loss of capacity, but most probably also quality. It’s said that the new ground would not fit Category 4 (former Elite, UEFA’s highest) any more, falling to Category 3.