CHENNAI: I-League club Chennai City FC (CCFC) announced on Friday that it has entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Coimbatore Smart City Limited (CSCL) – a company that implements the Central government’s Smart City projects – to redevelop and maintain Coimbatore’s Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium for the next five years commencing from November 2017.
The Nehru Stadium has served as CCFC’s home ground this season.
Towards this end, CCFC and CSCL have agreed to form a special purpose vehicle (SPV), under which a world-class multi-sport residential smart sports city will be built by 2022., Times of India reports
The project, which will cost around Rs 2.5-3 billion, is part of Coimbatore’s smart city plan. While the land for the sports city will be provided by Coimbatore corporation, CSCL will allocate the funds. CCFC will be responsible for the planning, design, construction and budgeting of the stadium.
The facility will come up within 10-15 km radius of Coimbatore airport and will be built on a 50-acre land. It will be home to football, cricket, athletics and badminton among other sports. There will also be residential facilities, school, artificial turf grounds and swimming pools, TOI quotes an CSCL official as having confirmed.
“Coimbatore is an industrial city. But we don’t have a proper sports infrastructure. So we were planning to build a sports city in Coimbatore for the last two years with some of the smart city funds. But we didn’t quite know whom to approach and how to go about it. When CCFC came to play their matches in Coimbatore, we saw how they refurbished the Nehru stadium and were highly impressed with their way of functioning. It was then that we decided that we will use their expertise to build the sports city. It will have state-of-the-art facilities and we want to host international football, cricket and athletics event,” the official told TOI on Friday.
The SPV is likely to be in place by April, after which work will start for the project.
CCFC co-owner and CEO Rohit Ramesh told the daily that they would bring in international expertise to finish the project.
