We won’t be moving stadiums in our lifetime. What about tweaking it constantly to improve atmosphere? Starting with a home end.
Take the Bobby Moore Stand. Move the screen onto the roof. Fill the dead gap between the lower and upper with seats (adding ~3k seats). Turn it into a dedicated singing/standing end behind the goal for the fans who actually want to make noise.
That gives you a one-tier home end of roughly 12k–13k instead of the atmosphere being spread thin across a huge bowl.
That’s the problem with our ground. Those who actually try to create an atmosphere are split up across: BML, STBL, nearby blocks like 113 in the West Stand, and scattered around the rest of the bowl. The ground is so vast, that any atmosphere is just lost in it.
Put everyone in one end, treat that end acoustically, and the noise actually has a chance to build and reverberate around the stadium instead of just disappearing into the void.
The best part is it’s not even a fantasy rebuild. You are not moving the pitch. You are not touching the track. You are not rebuilding the whole ground. You are just using the Bobby Moore footprint properly instead of wasting a massive chunk of it on that ridiculous screen void.
From VERY rough numbers, it looks like about a £10m job.
Another obvious change to the ground is to recolour seats claret so it actually feels like our home. That looks like a sub-£2m job.
Another thing, if it works, do a similar version later to the Sir Trevor Brooking Stand.
IMO a proper 12k–13k Bobby Moore end could do more for the identity and atmosphere of London Stadium than anything else the club could realistically do.
With the exit of KB and potential changes that the top of the club could this ever be put forward?
Thoughts?
by Neat_Stage4852
15 Comments
This is what happens when you rent an athletics stadium.
Small improvement but I’ll never be happy unless it’s either knocked down and rebuilt or we move elsewhere.
New owners, buy stadium, rebuild. OR invest in a track that sinks down so that lower tier seating (or safe standing!) Can extend much nearer the pitch
this makes the top look closer but we wouldn’t be able to do that due to the shape of the stadium.
Where are you getting this money from? We’ve got serious cash flow problems
The place just needs leveling. Start again. It doesn’t work and never will.
Problems:
– our owners won’t foot the bill, because they rent the stadium
– the stadium owners wont foot the bill because we rent it as-is
– the cost would be massive
>From VERY rough numbers, it looks like about a £10m job.
With no explanation, this clearly plucked from the air.
Fulham just spent £130m on expanding the Riverside stand by 4k.
Expanding the Anfield Road end by 5k cost £60m.
Redeveloping the whole of St. James’s park, and only adding 15k capacity is looking £1b.
Construction work is incredibly costly. The more complicated it is, the more costly it is. I am not an engineer, so I have no idea how much might cost. But I can say that the London Stadium is a generally complex building, from the roof, to the stands break down.
It’s not as simple as slapping some more seats in. We don’t even know if the foundations are rated for that kind of huge expansion.
As others have said, to even get close to this, you will likely need to knock the whole stand down and start again.
“We won’t be moving stadiums in our lifetime”
We will. Unless you’re 80-90 years old.
The next owners will sort something out with the council and gov and get a good deal. The problem is that Sullivan and co pissed off a lot of people in London. DK or new owners will have to either buy the land and stadium, so the council can save face on a huge error having never made it a football stadium after the Olympics, allowing us to knock it down and rebuild a proper stadium, or tear up the lease and move. But that requires buying land. Qatari’s own a lot of land around there…
Both of these are good BUT the seats would need be disappear in athletics mode as that stand moves back, not sure how this would work?
You don’t own the stadium
You don’t own the stadium so can’t
Don’t take away my beer garden
/s
In the States, lessons were leearned in the 1970s. The brilliant idea was to combine baseball and American football stadiums. How many billions have since gone into undoing the mistake of multipurpose stadiums?
Surely you’re not allowed to dangle a tv over people’s heads