The works of RC Celta sports city started today with the symbolic act of laying the first stone. The event brought together close to a thousand people including the RC Celta president, Carlos Mouriño; the vice-president of the Xunta de Galicia, Alfonso Rueda; the Councillor for Rural Affairs, José González Vázquez; the mayoress of Mos, Nidia Arévalo; the general secretary for Sport, José Ramón Lete, as well as all the management of the club and players of the first team and youth categories. The beginning of the works will allow the first team to train in the new facilities in July 2020 in a project that will place Celta as an international reference as well as consolidating a key objective for the club: to invest in training and an academy of top-level players to nurture the first team.
RC Celta’s president, Carlos Mouriño, began his speech by pointing out that “this is an act of great transcendence. Two years ago we made a pact for the construction of this sports city. We set the clocks in motion. And today we are here those who have fulfilled the pact to make a bigger and bigger Celta,” he stressed. There are not those whose words have no validity,” he continued, “those who say they are with the Celta but the truth is that they do not want to let it grow. With today’s act what we do more than a first stone is to plant so that it blooms, a dream.
First team and academy
Mouriño, supported by its board of directors, stressed that this is “a facility that we had imagined thousands of times and will be the future of the club that today is, precisely, more hopeful with this act. Very few clubs can say that eleven of their players come from the academy. Talking about the first team and the youth academy is the same thing.
Carlos Mouriño said he was excited because the project has gone from being a dream to becoming reality and stressed that the emotion is reflected in the object that he himself was responsible for putting in the urn of the first stone: a sound plate with the Celta anthem that the fans always sing before each game. He thanked the neighbors of Mos who were able to see a great opportunity in this project and addressed all of them to point out that “someone wants to put a boot on your territory and as David did with Goliath, I tell you that you can beat him.
For his part, the general secretary for Sport of the Xunta de Galicia, José Ramón Lete, described as a milestone the act of first stone of the sports city, a project that is, said “fruit of the union, something that is in the DNA of Celta.
The mayoress of Mos, Nidia Arévalo, stated that this is an infrastructure “important for Mos, for Vigo and for the whole metropolitan area” and said that her team is “on the road to collaboration with Vigo. We are an open city council and I am going to continue with this project”.
The team captain, Hugo Mallo and the player of the team Benjamín celeste Germán Alonso, neighbour of Mos, who were in charge of introducing in the urn of the first stone a Celta t-shirt. The event featured the traditional music of Mos’s award-winning group, Lagharteiras.
A reference of the peninsular northwest
The sports city RC Celta will place Galicia as an international reference, being the first in Spain to have ample spaces for leisure. The project will house, in addition to the nine fields for professional and lower categories and a stadium for the subsidiary with capacity for at least 4,000 spectators, spaces for other sports, sports and non-sports leisure, activities in nature, concerts and music festivals, the University of Sport, in collaboration with the nearby University of Vigo; as well as the creation of an ecosystem linked to the technological starts ups in the sports environment.
For the time being, the works that have been carried out in recent months have focused on preparing the ground. The project, signed by the Galicians Jesús Irisarri and Guadalupe Piñera, also present at the event, is entirely inspired by the orography of the area to respect the environment in which it is located, overlooking the Vigo estuary. In fact, the project aims to become a benchmark for sustainability, management of water services, land and energy.
In total, sport, leisure, forest park and commerce will occupy a large area in which the sports city will occupy 237,000 square meters distributed in the nine fields (5 natural grass and four artificial), the multipurpose Arena, dressing room buildings, residence for lower categories, gymnasium and spa areas, the University of Sport and areas of technology, catering and leisure. The project will have almost 300,000 square meters of green forest park for public use where there will only be native Galician species. The rest of the surface will be used to improve the internal connection of the new facilities and the area in general. In addition, the new facilities will create 2,000 new jobs.
