The stadium myth: new grounds won't rescue your club

The Guardian

29-04-2025

'Nil satis nisi optimum,' boasts the motto of Everton FC: 'Nothing but the best is good enough.' Performances on the pitch over the past few seasons have suggested otherwise (what's Latin for 'Anything to stay up will do?') but in the form of the sparkling new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock, which will replace Goodison Park as Everton's permanent home from the start of next season, the club now has tangible proof that its historic aspiration to excellence is at last being met.
Based on the renderings and early footage of its interior, Everton Stadium (it will be a while before that bland placeholder is draped in the capitalist rococo of the 'TeslaDome' or 'Open AI's ChatGPT Arena' or 'Palantir Presents Bramley-Moore Dock') appears to be a pleasingly raked and compact arena that should retain at least some of the raucousness of Everton's old home. The stands are at the steepest pitch that regulations will allow, sightlines are unobstructed from every seat, and judging from the promotional videos, fans will never be more than 50 metres from either a toilet or a scouse pie, which seems like a key metric of success for any stadium in Liverpool.
Among the new structure's most hyped features is the South Stand, a single stand running from pitch to roof that will accommodate 14,000 fans and become, in the club's own words, a 'blue wall' and the 'beating heart' of Everton's home support.
The story in Liverpool, in which the hope of urban renewal rises in the shadow of a new sporting landmark, is being repeated across much of the rich world. From Milan to Miami, these are boom times for new stadium construction in Europe and the US. But why does the whole infrastructural bonanza feel so empty?
Everton Stadium's 'blue wall' is, of course, a nod to Borussia Dortmund's famous 'yellow wall' at Westfalenstadion, which now has a good claim to being the most widely imitated stadium feature on the planet. Every team building a stadium today wants a steep home end to host the most passionate fans and supply color and noise to the matchday experience: Tottenham Hotspur Stadium's 17,500-seat South Stand was designed to create a 'wall of sound' (or perhaps of fury, given the recent direction of the club), while in the US the Buffalo Bills are building a new 60,000-seater whose northern end zone will put fans as close as 12ft away from the on-field action and amplify home advantage, the architects claim, 'through an intimidating wall of support.' The team owners and many fans want them; the cities think they need them. But who actually benefits when the big tops go up?
Impressive structures though they may be, these new arenas all have a sameyness to them, even in the aesthetic claims that stadium designers now make about their creations' sensitivity to architectural heritage. Both Everton Stadium and the Bills' new arena, for instance, feature red brick bases that 'nod' to the industrial history of their surrounding cities – transforming, for the denizens of these proud old manufacturing centers, the pain of deindustrialization into the expensive pleasure of participation in the 21st century leisure economy.
Historically, the structural quirks and infelicities of stadiums – their harshness, exposure, sparse and potentially life-threatening food options, and barbarically long toilet lines – offered a kind of fuel to fan culture. Are we traveling towards a world of blandly perfect stadium engineering, where every stadium looks and feels the same, and every fanbase is funneled towards the same set of game-day habits and enthusiasms?
Given how small the circle that dominates the design of top-level stadiums is, the drift to homogenization may be no surprise. Most of the high-profile stadiums built in recent years are the work of a handful of firms including Populous, which built the new arenas for both Spurs and the Bills and was responsible for the 2000s-era 'retro' craze in baseball stadium design. Manica was responsible for Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, the Tennessee Titans' new home ground in Nashville, and the location-pending new stadium for the Chicago Bears. Foster + Partners designed Lusail Stadium in Qatar and was recently enlisted by Sir Jim Ratcliffe to design the yurt city that will eventually replace Old Trafford. Reis is behind the new bowls for Everton and Roma. Whatever the particularities of each site and club, there is a formula to these stadiums now, and it's making the gameday experience indistinguishable from Doha to Dallas.
Across Europe and the US, stadiums have become the great hope of urban regeneration – the prize asset that will, local officials hope, bring life and money back to stagnating cities. Superficially this seems like a perfect marriage: top clubs need the increased revenue that bigger, more sophisticated stadiums with richer facilities will bring, and cities need the boost to economic activity that should in theory follow from the construction of a major new venue. It's true, of course, that in professional sport's new world, revenue is king. For a football club in Europe to move, say, from a cramped and under-serviced 30,000-seater to a sleek new arena with room for 60,000 people and all the other assorted nonsense represents a massive step up in economic power, with the security to lock in chunky revenue streams for decades to come. In England, the economic incentives for stadium construction are even more powerful given that infrastructure expenses are exempt from the Premier League's new profitability rules: for top clubs, building big has become something akin to a financial free kick.
But however much economic sense they may make, at least in theory, new stadiums rarely (probably never) attract the same type of affection from fans commanded by the ramshackle, lived-in old grounds of team lore. As Arsenal's experience of the past two decades shows, the financial lift of a new arena sometimes comes with a far more damaging psychological and cultural drain. Nor do the economics always work out. In some cases these stadiums can become a potentially lethal albatross, not only because servicing the debt that's often incurred to build them is prohibitive but also because they sometimes spur overreach. Lyon, for instance, moved in to Groupama Stadium in 2016, but satisfying the repayments on their razzmatazz new 59,000-seat, Populous-designed home, amid broader Covid-authored financial distress and poor player recruitment, has become so burdensome that the club is now sinking in debt and on the brink of administrative relegation to France's second tier.
A simple solution to the problem of payment, of course, is to get someone else to take care of it. This is the financial relief line that franchises in the US have become particularly adept at tapping, with federal law allowing local governments to issue tax-exempt bonds to build sports facilities.
The heavy reliance on public money to fund construction costs in the US is partly a product of necessity. It's striking how much more expensive it now is to build a modern 60,000-seater in America than it is in Europe, the symptom of a broader infrastructural blockage that has become the focus of much recent writing: while Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, for instance, came in well over budget at £1.2bn ($1.5bn), the Chicago Bears' new colosseum, which is projected to be around the same size as Spurs' home ground, has been budgeted at a cost of $3.2bn. Public contributions for the new Titans and Bills grounds represent the two biggest stadium subsidies in US history.
The motivations that drive governments, not only in the US but also in Europe, to offer financial and political support to these projects are a mix of vanity (the prestige and magnetism of an architectural marvel), fear (the threat of defection by the home team to a different location, which is especially powerful in the US, with its long history of team-to-city betrayal and seduction), and ambition. Of these, it's ambition that gets all the headlines; throughout the planning approval, construction, and unveiling of every new stadium there is constant rhetoric about all the good the stadium is doing and will do to revitalize, regenerate, and reboot the surrounding economy. Just the other day Everton's owners were on the phone to the UK government, asking for more money on the basis that the club's new ground 'will accelerate Liverpool's regeneration', as the headline in the Financial Times put it. From taxes to regulation and even interest rates, the risk of capital flight is the great threat hanging over modern economic policy. Stadiums literalize this drama in striking, if not always obvious, ways, offering local governments a handy visual metaphor to satisfy themselves they are doing their bit to inject life into the local economy and attract outside investment while tying important cultural assets in place.
There's one small problem with the urban regeneration argument: it doesn't hold up against the evidence. Stadium-led revitalization is the myth that will survive the apocalypse. New stadiums, as a vast body of academic literature shows, bring few of the economic benefits that developers, team owners, and local politicians promise. Whatever stimulus they offer to economic activity in their immediate vicinity is invariably offset by a corresponding depression in spending and investment in other areas of the same city.
New stadiums facilitate a transfer of wealth, within geographies and across classes. In many cases they may do more harm than good, saddling local communities with the costs of construction and diverting public funds from education and housing while siphoning off all the stadium's future wealth for the team itself, which mostly means the team owners: a classic case of privatizing the profits while socializing the risks. Building new stadiums is great business for stadium architects, developers, facilities businesses, and team investors, and a lousy deal for everyone else. The financial flows involved – from the local community into the pockets of team owners – are as predictable as the designs of the stadiums themselves.
Even where public subsidies are modest the financial effects of new construction ripple out to supporters via higher ticket prices and more expensive amenities; eventually a day at the stadium becomes an occasional luxury rather than a regular pleasure. Tradition, community, rootedness are, we're always told, at the heart of any new stadium project, but inevitably they become diluted once the fresh concrete stands are filled. New stadiums don't just transform the physical reality in which a team plays; they change the team's fan base too, and the culture attached to it. And perhaps that's the real point inherent in the uniformity of modern stadium design: to eradicate the gnarly, unruly, difficult, and – let's be honest – poor supporters, to kick out the kooks and the crazies, and replace them all with docile, obedient consumers ready to stand, sing, and spend on cue.
The arrival of a new stadium heralds, in many ways, the birth of a new club, unburdened by whatever has come before.
From a distance Everton's new 52,000-seat home, a steel and glass bubble plopped on top of a sturdy brick base, has the aspect of a giant escape pod ready for launch. The more buffed, dazzling, screen-stuffed and hyperactive these new stadiums appear, the more they seem to embody not reinvestment in the communities they represent but liftoff from them.