Like Manchester United’s proposed new home adjacent to Old Trafford. In March, plans were announced for a 100,000-capacity stadium with an enormous canopy held up by three 200-metre high masts. Co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe promised it would be the “world’s greatest football stadium” when the £2billion plans were launched
Birmingham City unveiled their own ambitious drawings for a build named the Powerhouse Stadium last month. Twelve towering chimneys, a nod to the city’s industrial heritage, will be included in a 62,000-seater stadium like no other built by 2030.
The next 12 months could also see others finally show their hand, like long-term planners Chelsea and Newcastle United. Both accept their current homes have become a hindrance to growth, placing them alongside Barcelona, Paris Saint-Germain, the two Milan clubs and Roma in a cluster of European clubs thinking big and bold.
The needs of a football club are evolving and so, too, is stadium design.
Those ambitious UK projects from early in the century, like Wembley Stadium, the Emirates Stadium and Millennium Stadium, now appear dated. The Bernabeu, rebuilt at great expense by Real Madrid, and the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium now stand as the gold standard for clubs who want to widen their revenue streams.
Stadiums now have to be modern, dynamic and multi-functional. They are structures moving from analogue to digital worlds.
“If you think back to stadiums we delivered 20 years ago, Wembley, the Aviva (in Dublin), you can see them as stadium 1.0,” says Declan Sharkey, global director of Populous, the architects behind the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. “Stadiums we delivered 10 years ago were 2.0 and now we’re in a world where stadiums are 3.0.
“The big change we’ve all seen in this industry is how these venues are conceived. They must be a civic piece of architecture that is used 365 days a year and they have to be true destinations in their own right. A stadium getting used 20 days a year is a failure on every level.”
Manchester United and Birmingham clearly concur. Both intend to make new stadiums the striking centrepiece of wider developments, adjoined to large fan zones and commercial opportunities. The wider ambition will be to hold concerts and major sporting events.
Everton’s new Hill Dickinson Stadium, confirmed as a host venue for Euro 2028, is already a blueprint in this sense.
“Most of these grounds aren’t being replaced because they’re not safe or they’re going to fall down,” explains Dan Meis, the architect who designed the Hill Dickinson.
“It’s about improving the ability to generate revenue and improving the fan experience, all while keeping the club competitive. Clubs like Chelsea and Newcastle have these incredibly historic grounds but you get to a point where you have a decision to make. Fans’ expectations have changed, from the quality of seat they sit in to the quality of food they want to have.”
It all begs the question: how will football’s world look in another 20 years?
Every new stadium project justifiably considers itself unique but in Saudi Arabia, where planning for the 2034 World Cup finals continues, there is one that calls itself “a revolutionary football destination”.
The Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) Stadium, named after the Saudi Crown Prince, will be the focal point of Qiddiya, an entertainment megaproject roughly 25 miles south of Riyadh. Built on the side of the 200-metre-high Tuwaiq cliff, the 46,000-capacity build will include a retractable roof and pitch, as well as a monstrous LED wall that can slide back and offer views of Qiddiya City below. Such are the plans, a sci-fi movie might consider it fanciful.
Al Hilal and Al Nassr, the Saudi Pro League clubs, will share the venue post-2034 but the MBS Stadium has been devised with a capability of hosting multiple events in a single day.
“It’s a phenomenal vision,” says Sharkey, part of the Populous team that has seen the project’s groundworks begin on the MBS Stadium this year. “Clearly a big driver for that project was to be incredibly digitally advanced and flexible, but also to work within a wider masterplan.
“It will absolutely be a complete entertainment destination in its own right. What you see in the renders is what will be delivered. It will be a game-changer. Within that venue you could have multiple events in a single day, essentially changed within minutes and hours. That ultra-flexible architecture, morphing venues, will continue in the future. It will be the most technologically advanced venue delivered anywhere in the world.”
And a window to the future? Not quite. “The transformer nature of it, the flexibility and what it can actually do will be a game changer,” adds Sharkey. “Elements of it will definitely reshape stadium design going forward but it’ll never be a case of lifting something like that and dropping it elsewhere.”
The wider Saudi vision is not without significant controversy. In May, two leading human rights groups — FairSquare and Human Rights Watch (HRW) — accused FIFA of being “utterly negligent” in helping protect the workers who will build World Cup infrastructure projects in Saudi. The criticisms were contained in reports into the deaths of 48 migrant workers from Bangladesh, India and Nepal, and centred on the lack of safety provisions made on construction sites, the failure to properly investigate accidents and the speed with which bereaved families are compensated.
When contacted for comment by The Athletic in May, Saudi Arabia’s bid team did not respond. FIFA, meanwhile, shared the letter it sent to HRW from its general secretary Mattias Grafstrom, detailing how the world governing body has attempted to integrate human-rights commitments into its statutes and highlighting steps by the Saudi government to reform labour laws.
Cost will be another obvious obstacle to replicating the MBS Stadium or others in the Saudi Arabia World Cup plan. The Roshn Stadium in Riyadh will have a roof resembling shards of crystal, while the Neom Stadium is due to be incorporated into The Line mega city.
Budgets will always mould plans but technological advances will inevitably shape how a stadium’s aesthetic develops.
SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles opened in 2020, and includes a 70,000-square-foot Infinity Screen that has since inspired a halo screen hanging from the ceiling of the redeveloped Bernabeu. It is the notion of stadiums becoming immersive, much like the Las Vegas Sphere. That same technology was used in the facade of the impressive Prince Moulay Abdellah Stadium in Rabat, Morocco, which hosted the opening game of the ongoing Africa Cup of Nations.
LED is everywhere in the new builds, as are lighting and sound systems that, in theory, heighten experiences.
Concourses, too, are changing. Self-serve kiosks are becoming the norm, allowing supporters to pick up their food and drink and have payment taken from pre-registered accounts. The robots might not have taken over but they are there to lend a hand.
“The technology is there to do something incredible,” says Sharkey. “The virtual reality piece is also fascinating. How can you create an at-home premium seat through a virtual world for remote fans? Can you have an entire seating bowl that becomes a canvas?
“I think we’ll be looking at holographic player introductions and replays. How can you buy seats in a virtual stadium, how can you watch a game with a friend in a virtual seat?
“We have to get the blend of analogue and digital right. That’s key. People still seek out analogue and we’ve got to be mindful of that. And in many respects there’s nothing more analogue than a football match.”
Too great a shift in that balance will bring its own threats. Sacrificing tradition in pursuit of modernity has the potential to alter the feel of a stadium. It remains a consideration for every architect tasked with imagining a club’s future.
“I really believe in those technologies but I’m very sceptical about it becoming a virtual experience,” says Meis. “I get crazy when I see these ideas that the stadium of the future is going to be something totally different.
“That experience of being with other people, supporting your club and being on top of the pitch, that is timeless. No matter what else changes, that’s something you have to protect no matter what other technologies come along. People are still going to be attracted to that collective experience. Everything else is spice on top.”
Everton’s new home next to the River Mersey has been a hit with supporters, many of whom were not relishing the idea of saying goodbye to their historic Goodison Park stadium. It helps that the Hill Dickinson is a product of its city, enclosed by the old Bramley-Moore Dock walls and retaining a Grade II-listed hydraulic tower.
This typifies the drive to make stadiums belong. Everton’s owners, the Friedkin family, inherited the Hill Dickinson but used the same approach with its Italian club Roma. Designs by Populous for their new classical home take inspiration from the city’s auditoriums and a key design aspect is a huge ‘curva sud’ to accommodate the club’s most vocal supporters. The notion of a home “end” is increasingly en vogue, pushing back against the bowl designs. Both Tottenham Hotspur and Everton have felt that design benefit, something Birmingham also plan to include.
Those plans for a new home away from St Andrew’s have also leant heavily upon history.
“It was really clear from the outset that they had an appetite to try and create a stadium that felt really specific to the site, to the club and to Birmingham and its place in the Midlands,” says Eliot Postma of Heatherwick Studio, the UK architects behind the Powerhouse Stadium plans.
“It’s part of the Industrial Revolution. Too many stadiums feel generic and like spaceships. They could be anywhere. But sports clubs and franchises are some of the biggest brands on the planet and stadiums are the biggest physical representation of those brands. A new stadium is such an opportunity to help solidify a club’s identity.”
Birmingham’s plans are unique but also typify the shift. Owner Tom Wagner, of Knighthead Capital, wants the club’s new home to host NFL games and music concerts, with Tottenham having shown there is huge money to be made in diversifying.
The stadium will be the centrepiece of a sports quarter with inspiration, in part, coming from The Battery in Atlanta, an entertainment base next to Truist Park, home of the MLB’s Atlanta Braves. One of the 12 chimneys incorporated will include a lift to Birmingham’s highest bar.
The greatest thought, though, has gone into the stadium at the heart of the project. As well as a retractable roof and pitch, the design includes details to build the atmosphere. Steep stands close to the pitch will push the gradient limit of 35 degrees in the UK, while an acoustic ceiling can be altered depending on the event.
“The acoustics for football and concerts are at the other end of the spectrum,” says Postma. “We’re looking at the acoustic ceiling that sits below the roof to be reversible.
“So for football games, it bounces the sound, and then for a concert, you can have material on the other side that absorbs some of that sound, so you get really good acoustic quality throughout the stadium.
“And there is a question of how we deal with that above the away fan section, which is on one corner of the stadium. We’ve been playing with some ideas they could tweak around there, to maximise that home-field advantage.”
Birmingham’s grand plans have raised eyebrows, primarily over the proposed size of a stadium that will be more than twice the capacity of St Andrew’s (29,409). Sceptics have also wondered if Manchester United’s bid to create a 100,000-capacity stadium might prove beyond them given the costs. In September, alternative blueprints were produced for their new ground without a canopy.
The two projects would place their faith in English football retaining the current demand for tickets and there are doubts that the current golden age, with more people than ever attending games, will consistently lead to markedly bigger venues.
“I think you’ll see owners who will test that,” says Meis. “With Everton I can’t tell you how often I went back and forth with fans on Twitter about the size. There is a sweet spot, a point around that 50-60,000 where you start to tail off if you can’t fill all the seats.
“If you get much bigger than that then you’re putting people further away from the floor. People forget that those last 10-20,000 seats are the most expensive to build. They’re at the top of the building so everything has to get bigger — the stairways, number of toilets, it all becomes exponential to the cost. Right-sizing these buildings is a trick.”
The immediate surroundings also carry significance and value. In a nod to American markets, Fan Zones are increasingly common around English football stadiums, attracting people to the footprint earlier in the day and inviting them to stay after games. That is the motivation behind the canopy in Manchester United’s plans, with a public plaza said to be twice the size of Trafalgar Square.
“That’s not a technology thing or an invention, it’s really about people having that collective experience,” adds Meis. “For so long I’ve heard about the home experience, how you can watch the game from home with all these advances. But people still want to be at the stadiums for a collective experience. That’ll never change.”
