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 21st 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.
