Changes in fans’ habits, stricter financial regulations, and a flow of new owners with experience in American sports are provoking reassessing how football stadiums should look, feel and operate.
The most popular sport in the world is experiencing a construction boom to make people spend more time in places, spend more money while they are there and attend more often.
Premier League teams are in the process of adding more than 100,000 seats, several of Italy’s largest clubs are planning new stadiums, and both Spanish football giants Real Madrid and Barcelona have invested hundreds of euros in huge stadium renewal projects.
The impulse for the construction wave is partially motivated by changes in the financial regulations introduced by UEFA, a body that runs European football, and several domestic alloys.
In the past, teams were punished for reporting consistent financial losses, but there has been a recent move to a regulatory model that limits spending on players as a proportion of revenue.
This, in turn, led executives to maximize the revenue by all available channels. With media rights typically sold by competition organizers, increasing money from a club’s stadium has become more important than ever.
Some of the methods for increasing the recipe were inspired by experiences in American sport. Many soccer clubs in Europe share a owner with a large US sports team, including Manchester United and Liverpool, while others are associated with US investors.
A US lesson is the potential to increase gains by attracting fans to matches early and keeping them there longer after the final whistle. For this, clubs have been struggling to improve the facilities of bars and restaurants within their stadiums. After Tottenham moved to a new € 1.2 billion stadium (R $ 7.6 billion), which includes Europe’s longest bar, the average spending on a game day has risen from less than 2 euros per person to more than 16 euros (R $ 101.65), according to the London club.
“In England, the conversation often revolves around how much you can drink just before the game began, and if you get a drink in the break,” says Chris Return, director of Hok’s sports, recreation and entertainment. “In the US, in all sports, this is how much you can eat and drink for three hours nonstop.”
Another way to get more money from existing fans is to improve and increase premium hospitality offers on play days. The renewal of Camp Nou’s 1.5 billion euros (R $ 9.5 billion) will increase its capacity to 105,000, which will make it the largest stadium in Europe, but all additional seats will be for high level VIPs.
A new ring of hospitality cabins more than quadrupling the number of premium seats, and the most expensive will yield more than 80 thousand euros ($ 508,000) per season.
The pattern was established by Tottenham, where rich fans can enjoy food prepared by Michelin star chefs before and after games, and store their whiskey and thin wines on the club’s safe.
Hospitality cabins bring with them something vital to any investment in stadium: access to financing. The rights to market premium seats can be sold to third parties or used to ensure loan from infrastructure banks, relatively cheap financing for a sector where debt is notoriously expensive.
Stadium designers are also being asked to include facilities that will be open when there is no football happening to ensure that the place is generating revenue seven days a week. For example, Tottenham stadium also houses a f1 -brand kart track, while the Barcelona Museum attracts more than 1 million visitors a year.
Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium Stadium construction works will create a “entertainment destination throughout the year” with a new 400 -room hotel, bars and a museum, while Fulham recently opened its new Riverside Stand in Craven Cottage, which features a hotel, spa, several restaurants and a terrace pool. Others are looking to add shops, restaurants and gyms, as well as space for events and conferences.
“Stadiums are integral parts of our communities,” says Christopher Lee, Populous’s administrative director for Emea, a stadium architecture expert. “How can we make them work seven days a week?”
The ability to host great musical artists such as Beyoncé or Taylor Swift shows, or other sports – as NFL matches or boxing fights – can generate millions of pounds per year in additional revenue.
However, Real Madrid were forced to stop hosting concerts due to local sound pollution concerns, while Barcelona does not include musical shows in their investment plan due to increasingly intense competition among host sites for only a handful of potential events.
Some investors see football stadiums as the cornerstone of much larger ambitions for regeneration. Knighthead Capital, the Birmingham City FC proprietary hedge fund, wants to build a new stadium for 60,000 people, which expects to be the center of a 3 billion euros real estate development ($ 19 billion, including new business, business and residential spaces.
Manchester United plans for a new stadium with a capacity of 100,000 people to replace Old Trafford would also be fundamental to a much broader, government -backed project to revitalize the western Manchester.
Looking more at the future, some stadium architects are beginning to imagine a point where the real world and digital converge. Those responsible for the Mohammed Bin Salman Stadium on the outskirts of Riade – still a conceptual project included in Saudi Arabia’s plans for the 2034 World Cup – they say one day can host eSports matches in the hours before a great football game, with holograms and augmented reality implemented to bring video games on the stadium, before the real stars enter the field.
Others have spoken of smaller movements toward digital integration, such as the use of facial recognition to give access to the site instead of a ticket, or “gamifying” the presence rewarding fans who go to games with special digital privileges, such as access to exclusive goods.
“All this is about the crossing between digital and physical sports. How is it for the next generation of football fans? How do they want to consume football?” Says Lee.
