Emergence of the game

As football has evolved, so too has the design and planning of the stadium. Football, as it is understood today, took shape in the nineteenth century. To begin with, workers from local industries – such as steel factories, shipbuilding depots, or railway construction – created football clubs, where fans (and players) would come from the communities that they served. Soon enough they formed community stadiums with a community base. The football grounds were basic, functional enclosures designed to accommodate a pitch and its spectators. They emerged in a piecemeal fashion, with stands first along one flank and then another, until eventually the space was fully enclosed, thereby restricting spectatorship to ticket holders.

This form of stadium design was then progressed by Scottish architect Archibald Leitch, who completed a home for his beloved Rangers at Ibrox Park in 1899. Inspired by his work on industrial buildings, Leitch’s stadiums were functional and programmatically efficient. After Ibrox Park, Leitch went on to design many stadiums across Britain and Ireland, which several architects in continental Europe used as inspiration. As popularity for the sport grew, so did the capacity and occurrence of stadiums, with many exciting experimentation with stadium design throughout the twentieth century. Influenced by Leitch, architects such as Pier Luigi Nervi and Le Corbusier demonstrated that stadiums could absorb the tenets of modernism in their design, one of the prevailing architectural styles of the time.

The rise of broadcasting also had an architectural impact. By the 1950s, clubs had also begun installing floodlights in stadiums; these allowed matches to be played and broadcast in the evenings for the first time, with this coming the birth of the European Cup. The overall impact on the game was monumental. Over 32 million British viewers – equivalent to half the population at the time – watched the 1966 England-Germany World Cup Final at Wembley, with 96,924 fans present in the stadium itself, and 400 million viewers tuning in worldwide.

At the same time, as sociologist Fabio Salomoni reports, the post-war generation in Europe was undergoing a ‘Great Transformation’ where ‘young people were breaking away from the hierarchy of the family, acquiring their own spending power and forming groups that followed the game differently from their fathers.’ With this rise of this younger, larger fanbase led to legislation on crowd safety, came stadium management. In the UK, the landmark Taylor Report on the 1989 Hillsborough disaster resulted in the enforcement of guidelines for a new generation of safer stadiums. Perimeter and lateral fencing were removed, and the stands became all-seated, with many European stadiums following suit. 

Full article: The Architecture of Atmosphere: Designing Football Stadiums