The writer is the FT’s architecture and design critic
It’s an oddity that the Premier League is the most successful football league in the world but the best club football stadiums are all, pretty much, outside the UK. Barcelona’s Camp Nou, Milan’s San Siro or the vast Maracanã in Rio are all up there. Britain’s stadiums seem to lack that kind of ambition.
Will Sir Norman Foster’s plan for a £2bn, 100,000 capacity stadium for Manchester United beside their existing Old Trafford ground challenge that anomaly? Britain’s most successful architect is, after all, a Mancunian — his father worked at a factory almost next door in Trafford Park. And Foster was responsible for London’s widely acclaimed Wembley Stadium.
But there is something of the circus tent in this design that looks a little unsettling; something impermanent and flimsy. The three masts that support the roof are meant to evoke the trident of the Red Devil, the club’s logo, but the gossamer tensile fabric covering with its pinkish glow looks a little like an overstretched strawberry condom. But then this is the most efficient way of covering a large site, an architecture pioneered by German engineer Frei Otto in 1972 at his wonderful Munich Olympic Stadium. In a gesture towards Manchester’s persistent drizzle, the intent is to create a space Foster describes as “twice the size of Trafalgar Square” (he also redesigned Trafalgar Square).
Historically, the English football ground was an intensely urban form, a building intimately embedded in the industrial and residential infrastructure of its working-class fans. Much of the life of match day was drawn from the city around it — the streets, pubs and caffs that filled up with fans for a few hours each Saturday. Foster’s design attempts to swallow the whole experience under one roof, creating an environment that looks a little retro-sci-fi, like something from a planet with no atmosphere.
There are benefits to scale though. Apparently, those triple masts (the “Eiffel Tower of the North”) will be visible not only from the Peak District but from Liverpool, 31 miles away, not to mention the City of Manchester Stadium, the Etihad, a lot closer.
That the new stadium is being designed next to the old Old Trafford means no match revenue will be lost in switching stadiums (the old ground will be demolished) and, critically, the genius loci will be maintained, something so pivotal in football.
The biggest question perhaps is, who is it for? Minority shareholder Sir Jim Ratcliffe might be a billionaire but the club is £1bn in debt and there is little information about how the new stadium will be funded. Alongside the almost sacred importance of location in British football is a long-standing uneasiness about the monetisation of the game. Unlike in Spain or Germany, where some clubs are run on a not-for-profit basis and with fans voting on big decisions, the Premier League is run on an oligarch model. Loyalty is taken for granted and fans are screwed from ticket prices to shirts and drinks. Football has become more about ownership than a sense of belonging.
Manchester witnessed the birth of the industrial revolution and modern football. Both were based on the exploitation of the working classes. This massive soccer mall in which the stadium is the locus of a landscape of consumption makes that relationship a little clearer. It is a great metropolis that was built around mills and factories. The renderings show a stadium surrounded by dense development, an illustration of football as the city’s key global industry.
Friedrich Engels, who worked in his father’s Manchester mills in the 1840s, related a story about walking through the city with a “bourgeois”. Engels “spoke to him of the bad, unwholesome method of building, the frightful conditions of the working people’s quarters . . . The man listened quietly and said, ‘And yet there is a great deal of money made here”.
