How Big Is The Optimum Sports Stadium?

by Dugald Skene

This week, the Japan Sport Council officially launched its design competition for a new national stadium.  The stadium is to form the backbone of Tokyo’s bid to host the 2020 Olympic Games and would be due to be complete in 2018.

What is interesting to me is that the brief calls for a capacity of 80,000 seats.  In the most populated city on the planet, it seems that Tokyo could fill a stadium 3 times this size, so what are the factors at play that makes the ambition for this new stadium so modest?

Gone are the days it seems of the ‘mega’ stadium, the 200,000+ seat leviathans typically built in the Americas and Eastern Europe during the middle of the 20th century.  Indeed, it is rare to see any new stadium being built over the 90,000 seat barrier, with Wembley stadium in London and the 'Bird’s Nest' Olympic stadium in Beijing typifying the seemingly acceptable limits of size.

The Strahov Stadium in Prague could seat around 240,000 people

As with most things in the 21^st century, it seems a lot of this comes down to two things; safety and economics.

Many stadiums are limited by factors immediately around them, most notably transport infrastructure.  You can build a stadium as big as you like, but if you can’t get people there to fill it within an acceptable timeframe, there’s no point.  People arrive at stadiums over a much larger time period than when they leave. The exodus of 80,000 or 90,000 people from one place at one time often overwhelms the local area, it’s people and it’s transport system. 

There are also the inherent safety risks associated with large movements of people.  If badly organised or if panic ensues, it’s very easy to see crowds running over each other.  There is plenty of precedent highlighting the dangers of mass movement of humans.

So what of the economics?  This varies from stadium to stadium, depending on the sport and the team, the supply and the demand.  We have seen in the UK many top football clubs upgrade their stadia or move into new purpose built arenas, most notably Arsenal in London recently.  Local rivals Tottenham are also in the throes of building their new home (should their bid for the Olympic stadium fail).

London's Olympic Stadium seats around 80,000

The legitimacy of going through that process depends entirely on the amount of cash coming in week in, week out to these clubs.  For the English Premier League, there are 19 home games across the duration of the season, plus any cup fixtures.  Often, this isn’t enough, and clubs are increasingly looking to supplement their income by hosting music events.

In the NFL, the richest sports league in the world, stadium capacities are kept relatively low, around the 65,000 mark, because each franchise is only guaranteed 8 home fixtures each season.  These stadiums are seldom used for anything other than NFL fixtures, so typically for 357 days of the year, they sit redundant, essentially losing money.

It’s a similar story for national stadiums.  Used only a handful of times each year and rarely sold out, national sporting organisations need to find other ways to generate income.  Take Scotland’s home of rugby, Murrayfield.

At a capacity of 67,500, it is by far and away the largest stadium in Scotland by some 7,000 seats and yet is only guaranteed to host 5 Scotland games, in a sport that is generally considered to come a distant second in popularity to football.  The Scottish Rugby Union (SRU) have long struggled to justify the size of its home.

Murrayfield; the home of Scottish Rugby

The ongoing drama regarding the London’s newest stadium’s life after the Olympics is just the latest of many.  With multiple parties expressing interest in the structure, most notably from football teams and even a bid to include an F1 track in and around the Olympic Park, it seems that any new stadium requires to have the flexibility to adapt.

The Populous designed Olympic stadium has that flexibility built in, with the ability to downsize significantly from its 80,000 seat capacity.  But don’t expect that to happen soon as the intention is to retain it in its current form at least until the World Athletic Championships have been hosted in 2017.

Sydney seem to have got the balance right with their Olympic Stadium, now called the ANZ Stadium, built for the 2000 Olympics.  Built with a temporary capacity of 110,000, it was soon reduced to a more manageable 82,500.  More crucially, it is constantly used and it has the ability to host a number of sports with varying pitch requirements including rugby union, rugby league, Aussie rules football and cricket.  It of course helps that the city is sports daft and although the stadium rarely sells out, the sheer number of fixtures it can host keeps it very much afloat.

The ANZ Stadium in Sydney

It begs the question in the UK as to whether we really require a separate stadium for each sport?  In Australia, each major city is very much isolated from the next, but have very centralised fan bases.  This means each city only really needs one principal stadium, whether it be the ANZ in Sydney, or the MCG in Melbourne.

In London, to supplement the multiple premier league stadiums which vary from 25,000 to 60,000 seats, there is also Twickenham, Wembley and now the Olympic Stadium, totalling around 250,000 seats between the 3!

This is admittedly a hangover from the past, but as Tokyo seeks to build a new national icon, thoughts for designers must surely be to provide a facility that can provide for every sport.  For the largest stadia in the world, the overwhelming emphasis is to be financially self-sustainable.  The best way to achieve that is to consolidate as many sports as possible, increase the usage and maximise revenue. 

Let’s wait and see what the competition throws up.

What is your favourite stadium, and why? Leave your thoughts below.