Not since 1985, when Manchester United squeezed past Everton in the FA Cup final, has an English football fixture been attended by a crowd of 100,000.
Wembley’s shift to an all-seater stadium four years later soon stripped back its capabilities. Those grand old numbers have never been eclipsed.
Football’s popularity has boomed in the past four decades, but it’s always beneath these modern cantilevered glass ceilings. Too many clubs are now bound by unsuitable capacities, where demand for tickets outstrips supply.
The Premier League’s best attendance remains an 83,222 crowd that watched Tottenham Hotspur against Chelsea at Wembley six years ago, but there are now embryonic plans to break new ground.
Manchester United are favouring the construction of a new 100,000-capacity stadium as part of a consultation process over Old Trafford’s future that should conclude this year.
Neighbouring land, owned by United, could be used to deliver a home costing £2billion ($2.6bn) with minimal interruptions to matchday revenues. Sir Jim Ratcliffe seemingly has all of the optimism of Kevin Costner in a cornfield: build it and they will come.
Manchester United are planning to build a new stadium (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
This, though, would be a project like no other. Bigger than anything seen in the UK and among the largest sporting venues in the world. It would host as many supporters as Stamford Bridge and the Emirates Stadium combined. Timescales for a build of such magnitude would likely fall between six and 10 years.
The complete refurbishment of the Camp Nou, which has seen Barcelona play at a smaller former Olympic stadium up on the Montjuic hill, is about as close a comparison as United can look to for scale in Europe. With broader plans to regenerate Trafford Park and Salford Quays, this project might turn out to be bigger. A “once-in-a-century opportunity”, as Ratcliffe called it in March.
There is no obvious 100,000-capacity model to duplicate or blueprint to follow, yet United’s consultation process, led by the Old Trafford Regeneration Task Force chaired by Lord Sebastian Coe, has begun to believe it possible.
“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.”
Officials from United — and even Arsenal — will likely have had eyes opened when visiting SoFi for a friendly last weekend. The 70,000-capacity venue, built for a reported $6billion, is among the world’s most opulent stadiums.
United want a larger capacity, but the wider Hollywood Park site also projects a potential to be followed. As well as YouTube Theater, a 6,000-capacity concert venue, a 300-acre site that includes public parks and office space has transformed an unloved corner of LA.
SoFi is very much at its heart and the parallels are not to be ignored when local government, including Manchester’s mayor, Andy Burnham, continues to play a prominent role in planning. The backing — if not the funding — is undeniably there.
“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.”
Beyonce performing at the SoFi Stadium last year (Kevin Mazur/WireImage for Parkwood)
The enormous scale of United’s touted plans have created the most headlines. Aside from the London Stadium, originally constructed to host the 2012 Olympic Games before being repurposed to house West Ham United, the biggest Premier League venue built from scratch was the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, which has a capacity of just under 63,000.
Everton are scheduled to move to their new home on Bramley-Moore Dock before the 2025-26 season but, with a capacity of 53,000, that would be almost half the size of what United have in mind.
There is typically a sweet spot for big stadium projects of between 60,000 and 80,000 seats. The recently completed redevelopment of the Santiago Bernabeu Stadium, for example, cost Real Madrid £1.5billion, but the built-up surrounding areas limited its capacity.
There also tends to be other obstacles, including financial cost and the breadth of a fanbase, that ensure a 100,000-capacity stadium is seldom considered. Even Saudi Arabia’s biggest planned project for the 2034 World Cup, the King Salman International Stadium, will be capped at 92,760.
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.”
A view from the back of SoFi — the highest seats in a stadium are the most expensive to build but are the cheapest tickets (Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)
The cost of such an ambitious project will inevitably be vast. An article for Building Magazine in February outlined a cost model for a theoretical stadium redevelopment that would see a 40,000-capacity venue increased by 6,000 through the construction of a new upper tier.
It was estimated even a build of that size would come to £116million, with steel frames and a roof costing £25million alone. Air conditioning, heating and ventilation systems would be another £8million — or a quarter of a Joshua Zirkzee. Then there is the wider infrastructure and the necessary improvements to roads and transport links. United would at least avoid starting from nothing on a site that can already safely host 75,000 people.
At roughly £1billion, the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium was the most expensive Premier League home to build. Given subsequent inflation, rising costs of building materials and United’s bigger plans, it would be near-enough impossible to keep the bill under £2billion for a state-of-the-art, as Ratcliffe has promised, 100,000-capacity project.
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.”
If Manchester United’s current home, with its capacity of 75,000, can generate £136million in matchday revenues each season, targets would be likely be set to raise that number north of £200million with an extra 25,000 fans in attendance and, inevitably, greater corporate facilities.
Ratcliffe can paint an altruistic picture for this traditionally industrial corner of south-west Manchester, but driving up the turnover of the club he part-owns is the greatest motivation to knocking down Old Trafford and its leaking roof.
“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.”
A £2billion build is roughly the same as three years of Manchester United’s total revenue. How that is paid for becomes just as big a question to answer in the years to come.
“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.”
Arsenal and Manchester United playing a friendly at SoFi Stadium (Patrick T Fallon / AFP via Getty Images)
Spurs, who secured interest rates of 2.8 per cent in their long-term borrowing, were blessed with the timing of their project, even if the Covid-19 pandemic brought an unforeseen early closure to supporters. Everton, mired by off-field problems, have been much less fortunate, even losing a proposed naming rights deal with former club partner USM, owned by Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov, following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
The Athletic reported last month that Manchester United had already considered selling the naming rights to Old Trafford or a new stadium, as well as holding exploratory talks with major financial institutions, including Bank of America, to secure the necessary funding. Projects of this scale will not pay for themselves.
“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)
