Ever since Manchester United defeated Everton in the FA Cup final in 1985, there has never been a 100,000-person crowd for an English football match.
Four years later, Wembley became an all-seater stadium, quickly reducing its capacity. Never have those magnificent old numbers been surpassed.
Over the last forty years, football’s popularity has surged, yet it has always been below these contemporary cantilevered glass ceilings. Far too many clubs these days are constrained by inadequate capacity, meaning that demand for tickets exceeds supply.
The 83,222 spectators who witnessed Tottenham Hotspur vs. Chelsea at Wembley six years ago still hold the record for the largest Premier League attendance, but there are already plans in the works to set new records.
Manchester United is in favor of building a new stadium with 100,000 seats as part of a consultation process about the future of Old Trafford, which is expected to come to an end this year.
United owns adjacent land that might be utilized to build a £2 billion ($2.6 billion) house with no disruption to matchday revenue. It seems that Sir Jim Ratcliffe believes that if you build it, people will come, much like Kevin Costner in a cornfield.
However, this would be a unique project. Greater than anything observed in the United Kingdom and ranking among the biggest athletic arenas globally. It would accommodate more fans than both the Emirates Stadium and Stamford Bridge put together. A structure of this size would probably take six to ten years to complete.
About the closest equivalent to scale in Europe that United can find is the total renovation of Camp Nou, which has seen Barcelona play at a smaller former Olympic stadium up on the Montjuic hill. This project may become larger due to the larger plans for the regeneration of Salford Quays and Trafford Park. Ratcliffe referred to it as a “once-in-a-century opportunity” in March.
Lord Sebastian Coe’s Old Trafford Regeneration Task Force, which is in charge of United’s consultation process, has started to think that a 100,000-capacity model may be achieved even if there is not an obvious model or blueprint to copy.
“A stadium has to be part of a much wider picture,” Alex Thomas, regional design director, sports and entertainment at HKS, the renowned United States-based architecture firm behind SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles and Dallas’ AT&T Stadium, tells The Athletic.
“You can’t just plonk a stadium in on its own anymore. You have to consider the effect it has on the city around it and the opportunity it creates. ‘Opportunity’ is the big word.
“The cost of a huge stadium is colossal and responsible business people will want to leverage the asset as much as possible. It’s not just about making money, though. It’s about generating greater benefits and creating other uses that bring people to the site.
“A stadium has such a huge catalytic effect on a large radius around it, so why wouldn’t you create a great masterplan around it? It’s about something happening every single day in the communities formed around it. The stadium will always be the main draw and the brand.”
When they visited SoFi for a friendly last weekend, United’s and even Arsenal’s officials probably had their eyes opened. The 70,000-seat stadium, which cost an estimated $6 billion to build, is one of the most lavish in the entire globe.
Although United want a higher capacity, the larger Hollywood Park site also has possibilities that should be pursued. Along with YouTube Theater, a 6,000-seat performance hall, a 300-acre complex featuring office buildings and public parks has revitalized an underappreciated area of Los Angeles.
At its core, SoFi is very much the same, and the similarities should not be overlooked as long as local government—including Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham—remains heavily involved in planning. There is no denying the support, if not the money.
“In the case of SoFi, the primary purpose is to have a home for the LA Rams and the Chargers,” says Thomas, with SoFi also capable of hosting 100,000 people for music concerts.
“You create a platform to leverage every experience around it first and foremost, but it’s also having the flexibility to allow all these other things to happen, bringing benefits and that ripple effect. It all combines to form this district, offering the chance to bring people there on different days of the year. You’re trying to sweat the asset, trying to design flexibility and multi-functionality.”
The most newsworthy aspect of United’s lauded ambitions is their sheer size. Except for the London Stadium, which was built from the ground up to host the 2012 Olympic Games before being converted to West Ham United’s home, the largest Premier League venue ever built was the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, which holds little under 63,000 spectators.
With a capacity of 53,000, Everton’s new home on Bramley-Moore Dock is expected to be completed before the 2025–2026 season, which is nearly half the size of what United had in mind.
For large stadium developments, there is usually a sweet spot of 60,000 to 80,000 seats. For instance, Real Madrid spent £1.5 billion redeveloping the Santiago Bernabeu Stadium, but its capacity was constrained by the surrounding developed regions.
Other barriers, like as the expense and size of the fan base, usually ensure that a stadium with 100,000 seats is rarely contemplated. There will be a cap of 92,760 seats even in the King Salman International Stadium, Saudi Arabia’s largest proposed building for the 2034 World Cup.
Why do modern stadiums rarely run to six-figure capacities?
“The bigger you build, the more expensive it gets,” says Thomas. “The back row of your stadium contains your cheapest seats, yet because they’re way up in the air, they’re the most expensive to construct. There is a law of diminishing returns — you add huge costs in return for generating a comparatively small ticket revenue.
“And no one likes to see an empty stadium. Empty seats in the stadium are bad news for everyone and the atmosphere. It’s a right-sizing exercise.
“It’s all part of the process. It might come down to something as simple as not having enough space. There might be physical or technical limitations around sight lines and other things. You could go much bigger than 100,000 if you’ve got reasons to.
“It’s not just about getting 100,000 people and, in the event of an emergency, just about getting them out. You’ve got to think about the whole experience, the entire day. That’s when you start thinking about the whole city, people travelling from all over the world to come to your venue. You have to think how the stadium stitches into the city and the public realm around it.”
Such a large-scale undertaking will undoubtedly be quite expensive. A February article for Building Magazine detailed a cost model for a hypothetical stadium renovation that would add an additional deck to the existing 40,000-seat stadium, increasing capacity by 6,000.
Even a construction that big was predicted to cost £116 million, only for the steel framework and roof. An additional £8 million, or 25% of a Joshua Zirkzee, would be needed for air conditioning, heating, and ventilation systems. Then there is the expanded infrastructure and the required upgrades to the transportation network and highways. At minimum, United would refrain from commencing from scratch on a location that can securely accommodate 75,000 individuals.
The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium was the most costly Premier League stadium to construct, costing almost £1 billion. It would be nearly impossible to keep the cost of a state-of-the-art project under £2 billion given the inflation that has since occurred, the rising cost of building materials, and United’s larger aspirations. Ratcliffe has promised a project with 100,000 capacity.
Nick Marshall, co-owner and director at the London-based architect KSS, spoke to The Athletic last year in an examination of stadium costs.
“As soon as you go in the air though and start putting seats at height, you’re into a different level of cost,” said Marshall, whose firm was behind Liverpool’s Main Stand, which opened in 2016.
“The things that affect the cost are roof spans and the structural integrity of, primarily, the upper tiers. As soon as you start going with spans above 12 to 14 metres, you start ratcheting the cost up quicker. Typically a big two- or three-tier stand, even with general admission seats, is going to be a span of 35 to 40 metres. You’re paying for quite a lot of airspace and cantilever roofs so you avoid any columns.”
The next 12 months, when plans begin to crystalise, promise to be revealing.
“From an architect’s perspective, you ask where the money should be spent in a project,” adds Thomas. “Do we need a moving roof? Because that’s an expensive thing that could see money spent elsewhere on the stadium to bring other benefits.
“The planning, the design, and the cost all work together and all that thinking needs to be done before you start digging holes in the ground. That gives you the certainty that you’re doing the right thing. When you’re talking about the success of a stadium, you’re talking about decades.”
With an additional 25,000 spectators and, naturally, larger corporate facilities, aims would be set to lift matchday income north of £200 million if Manchester United’s present 75,000-seat stadium can bring in £136 million annually.
Ratcliffe can portray this traditionally industrialized area of south-west Manchester in an altruistic light, but the biggest incentive to demolish Old Trafford and its leaky roof is to increase revenue for the team he co-owns.
“Manchester United has a fanbase that not many clubs, if any, can match,” says Dr Dan Plumley, senior lecturer in sport finance at Sheffield Hallam University.
“I’m not sure it’s a question of whether they could fill it, so if this was to come off it would be transformational in the long-term, on a scale we’ve never seen in English football.”
Approximately equivalent to three years’ worth of Manchester United’s total revenue, a £2 billion build. In the coming years, how that is paid for will become an equally important subject to address.
“If you look at Spurs being a blueprint, that was a combination of the club’s resources, generating revenue, but more importantly, it was loans,” adds Plumley.
“That comes in different ways. Traditional lenders of finance. Spurs had a lot of revolving credit facilities with banks, which were renegotiated as and when needed.
“It could be from private equity, something Everton have done. You are looking at your resource base and what you’ve got to throw at it and what other investors you can perhaps bring to the table to see the long-term gain. And then there’s the traditional borrowing, all with an eye on huge long-term benefits.”
Even though the Covid-19 pandemic forced an unanticipated early end for backers, Spurs were fortunate with the time of their project and were able to get interest rates of 2.8% in their long-term borrowing. Due to their off-field issues, Everton has had far less luck. After the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, they even lost a potential naming rights agreement with USM, a former club partner owned by Russian businessman Alisher Usmanov.
In order to obtain the required funds, The Athletic revealed last month that Manchester United had already explored selling the naming rights to either Old Trafford or a new stadium. They had also held preliminary discussions with significant financial institutions, such as Bank of America. This kind of project will not be profitable.
“Naming rights are a good way of recouping some of that initial outlay and you’re always looking at the long-term,” adds Plumley. “It’s going to take Spurs about 23 years to pay off the stadium, roughly £30million a year. But the chance to generate revenue alongside that is the long-term pay-off.
“Naming rights are a good option, but also events when your stadium’s not hosting Premier League games. We’ve seen Spurs hosting the NFL, concerts, a Formula One partnership. The model is there to replicate.”
Any journey towards a 100,000-capacity stadium promises to be long and costly. Manchester United, though, can justifiably believe the endpoint will make it all worthwhile.
(Top photo: Getty Images)
