Not since 1985, when Manchester United beat Everton in the FA Cup final, had an English match drawn a crowd of 100,000.
The move of Wembley to a stadium with capacity for all, four years later, temporarily reduced its capacity. These wonderful ancient figures have never been eclipsed.
Soccer’s popularity has skyrocketed over the past four decades, but it still holds up under modern cantilevered glass roofs. Too many clubs are now constrained by insufficient capacity, where demand for tickets outstrips supply.
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Premier League attendance is still that of 83,222 spectators who watched Tottenham Hotspur-Chelsea at Wembley six years ago, but now there are embryonic plans to break new ground.
Manchester United are in favour of building a new 100,000-capacity stadium as part of a consultation process on the future of Old Trafford that is expected to conclude this year.
The neighbouring land, owned by United, could be used to build a space costing £2bn ($2. 6bn) with minimal disruption to matchday revenue. Sir Jim Ratcliffe turns out to have all the optimism of Kevin Costner in a cornfield: build it and they will come.
But it would be a task like no other. Larger than anything seen in the United Kingdom and one of the largest sports venues in the world. It would accommodate as many fans as Stamford Bridge and the Emirates Stadium combined. The term for a structure of this magnitude would be between six and ten years.
The whole redevelopment of Camp Nou, in which Barcelona played in a smaller former Olympic stadium on Montjuïc Hill, is the closest comparison United can make in terms of scale in Europe. With wider plans to regenerate Trafford Park and Salford Quays, this task may simply prove to be bigger. A “once-in-a-century opportunity,” as Ratcliffe called it in March.
There is no apparent style of a 100,000-seat capacity to reflect on or a plan to follow, but United’s consultation process, led through the Old Trafford Regeneration Working Group chaired by Lord Sebastian Coe, has begun to make it possible.
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“A stadium has to be part of a much larger whole,” Alex Thomas, regional director of design, sports and entertainment for HKS, the prominent American architecture firm SoFi Stadium and AT Stadium in Los Angeles, told The Athletic.
“You can no longer build a stadium alone. You have to take into account the effect it has on the city around it and the opportunities it creates. ‘Opportunity’ is the big word.
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“The cost of a huge stadium is colossal and the guilty businessmen will have to take advantage of this asset as much as possible. But it is not just about making money. It is about generating greater profits and creating other uses that attract other people to the stadium. place.
“A stadium has a huge catalytic effect on a giant radius around it, so why not create a great master plan around it?It is anything that happens every day in the communities that form around it. The stadium will be the main charm and brand.
United officials (and even Arsenal officials) will probably have opened their eyes when they visited SoFi for a friendly last weekend. This 70,000-seat stadium, built for an estimated $6 billion, is one of the world’s finest sumptuous stadiums.
United needs more capacity, but the larger Hollywood Park stadium also plans to move forward. In addition to the YouTube Theater, a 6,000-seat concert hall, 300 acres of public parks and offices have reshaped an unloved corner of Los Angeles.
SoFi is at the heart of this task and the parallels do not deserve to be ignored when local government, Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham added, continues to play a leading role in planning. It is undeniable that the investment (if not the investment) is there.
“In SoFi’s case, the main goal is to have a home for the LA Rams and Chargers,” Thomas says, and SoFi also has the capacity to host another 100,000 people at music concerts.
“You’re creating a platform to take advantage of each and every experience around it, first of all, but it also has the flexibility to allow all those other things to happen, generating benefits and that ripple effect. All this bureaucracy in this district provides the option of bringing other people there other days of the year. What you are looking for is to take advantage of the asset and design with flexibility and multifunctionality.
The enormous scale of the projects promoted through United made headlines. Aside from the London Stadium, originally built to host the 2012 Olympics before being changed to host West Ham United, the Premier League’s largest stadium built from scratch, Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, which has a capacity of just under 63,000 people.
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Everton are expected to move into their new home at Bramley-Moore Dock before the 2025-2026 season, but, with a capacity of 53,000, that would be almost part of what United have in mind.
There is a sweet spot for giant stadium projects with between 60,000 and 80,000 seats. The recently completed refurbishment of the Santiago Bernabéu stadium, for example, cost Real Madrid £1. 5bn, but the surrounding built-up spaces limited its capacity.
There are also obstacles, such as the monetary cost and length of the fan base, which mean a stadium with a 100,000-seat capacity is rarely considered. Even Saudi Arabia’s largest allocation for the 2034 World Cup, the King Salman International Stadium, will be capped at 92,760 seats.
Why do stadiums rarely operate with six-figure capacities?
“The bigger you build, the more expensive it is,” Thomas says. “The last row of your stadium has the cheapest seats, but because they’re so high, they’re the most expensive to build. There is a law of diminishing returns: you raise massive prices in exchange for generating small price income.
“And nobody likes to see an empty stadium. Empty seats in the stadium are bad news for and for the atmosphere. It’s an exercise in resizing.
“It’s all part of the process. This can also simply be due to something as undeniable as not having enough space. There may be physical or technical limitations around sightlines and other things. It can also go well beyond 100,000 if you have an explanation for why you do it.
“It’s not just about bringing in another 100,000 people and, in case of emergency, taking them out. You have to think about the total experience, the total day. That’s when you start thinking about the whole city, about the other people who come from all over the world to come to your house. We want to think about how the stadium fits into the city and public area around it.
The cost of such an ambitious task will inevitably be enormous. A February article in Building Magazine laid out a design plan for a theoretical redevelopment of the stadium that would see a venue that seats 40,000 more people than 6,000 through the structure of a new level.
It was estimated that even a structure of this length would cost £116 million, with metal frames and a roof costing £25 million. The air conditioning, heating and ventilation systems would cost £8 million more, or a quarter of Joshua Zirkzee’s cost. Then there is the broader infrastructure and mandatory innovations in roads and maritime connections. United would at least avoid starting from scratch at a site that can already safely hold 75,000 people.
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At around £1 billion, the Tottenham Hotspur stadium was the most expensive Premier League building ever built. Given upcoming inflation, emerging construction curtain prices and United’s more ambitious plans, it would be highly unlikely to keep the bill below £2bn for a state-of-the-art project, as Ratcliffe l’ promised, with a capacity of 100,000 people.
Nick Marshall, co-owner and director of London-based architect KSS, spoke to The Athletic last year about a review of stadium costs.
“As soon as you get up in the air and start putting the seats up, you end up at another level of loading,” said Marshall, whose company was Liverpool’s main stand, which opened in 2016.
“The elements that charge are the light of the ceiling and the structural integrity, mainly of the upper floors. Once you start using lights over 12 to 14 meters, you can start raising prices more quickly. Typically, a giant two- or three-level grandstand, even with general admission seating, will be 35 to 40 yards wide. You’re paying for a lot of elevated area and overhanging ceilings to avoid columns.
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The next 12 months, as the plans begin to come to fruition, will be eye-opening.
“From an architect’s point of view, you wonder where the money is going to be spent on a project,” Thomas adds. “Do we want a mobile roof? Because it is an expensive thing that money spent elsewhere in the stadium can generate other benefits.
“Planning, designing, and loading all the paints together and this whole idea needs to be done before you start digging holes in the ground. This gives you confidence that you’re doing the right thing. When we talk about the good fortune of a stadium, we are talking about decades.
If Manchester United’s current 75,000-capacity stadium can generate £136 million in revenue during the season, the aim is most likely to increase that figure above £200 million with an additional 25,000 fans and, inevitably, larger corporate facilities. Formation
Ratcliffe would conceivably paint an altruistic picture of this historically commercial corner of southwest Manchester, but expanding the turnover of the club he co-owns is the biggest motivation for demolishing Old Trafford and its leaky roof.
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“Manchester United have a fan base that few, if any, can match,” says Dr Dan Plumley, professor of sports finance at Sheffield Hallam University.
“I’m not sure it’s about whether they’ll be able to just fill it, so if this happens, it would be transformative in the long term, on a scale we’ve never seen in English football. “
A £2 billion build is roughly equivalent to three years of Manchester United’s total revenue. How this will be paid for will be an equally vital question that will need to be answered in the coming years.
“If you look at Spurs as a model, you’ll see that they’re a combination of the club’s resources, which generate revenue and, more importantly, make loans,” Plumley added.
“This comes in other ways. Traditional financing lenders. Spurs had revolving credits with banks, which were renegotiated when necessary.
“It may just come from personal capital, which is what Everton did. One takes a look at its resource base, what it has to load into it, and what other investors it might bring in to see long-term profits. And then there are the classic bonds, all with a view to making massive profits in the long run.
Spurs, who earned a 2. 8% interest rate on their long-term loans, were fortunate to be able to carry out their mission at the right time, despite the Covid-19 pandemic causing an early and unforeseen closure for fans. Everton, mired in off-field problems, have had much less luck, even squandering a proposed naming rights deal with the club’s former spouse, USM, owned by Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov, following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. .
Athletic said last month that Manchester United had already sold the naming rights to Old Trafford or a new stadium, as well as holding exploratory talks with major financial institutions, including Bank of America, to secure the mandatory financing. Projects of this scale will not be profitable.
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“Naming rights are a smart way to recoup some of that upfront expense and are intended for the long term,” adds Plumley. “It will take Spurs around 23 years to pay off the stadium, which costs around £30m a year. But the ability to generate a source of income throughout this is a long-term benefit.
“Name rights are a smart choice, but also for occasions when there are no Premier League matches in your stadium. We’ve noticed that the Spurs host the NFL, concerts and a partnership with Formula 1. The style is there to be reproduced.
Any vacation in a 100,000-seat stadium promises to be long and expensive. Manchester United, however, can rightly assess the result.
(Top photo: Getty Images)