Bill Shankly, a man so beloved by Liverpool that there is now a hotel in the city named after him, once famously observed: “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”
Inevitably, Shankly pops up in Home Ground, a punchy new exhibition on the architecture and social culture of football stadiums. The legendary manager is pictured savouring the acclaim of an adoring crowd, part of a tableau on the farewell to the Kop prior to its metamorphosis from churning tribal terrace into a more sedate, all-seater stand.
Marinaded in the romance and obsessiveness of the beautiful game, Liverpool is a serendipitous setting for a dive into the history and destiny of football grounds. Everton have just migrated to a super sleek new home, the 52,000 capacity Hill Dickinson Stadium on the Mersey waterfront, neatly encapsulating the distance football and its venues have travelled from rain-lashed terraces, flat caps and leaden balls, to a high-end, multi-sensory experience, with those who can afford it cosseted in private boxes and plied with fine dining, not unlike a visit to the opera.
Illustrated by a rich assortment of drawings, models, photographs and other ephemera, the exhibition’s chronological sweep opens with a 1906 plan of Anfield by Scottish architect Archibald Leitch. The towering terrace of 132 steps at the home end became known as the Kop, after the bloody hilltop battle of Spion Kop during the Boer war.
Drawing on his early experience of designing factories and warehouses, Leitch went on to become the imperator of early football grounds. With daunting efficiency, he notched up more than 20 across the UK, including Stamford Bridge (Chelsea), Highbury (Arsenal) and Ibrox (Glasgow Rangers). Over a 29-year period he also designed Goodison Park, home of Liverpool’s great rivals Everton. Still used by its women’s team, it was the first ground in Britain to have seats and terracing on all four sides.
England may have invented and formalised the game, but in the matter of stadium design, it was its European neighbours who really ran with the ball. In Florence, Fiorentina employed the renowned modernist Pier Luigi Nervi to devise a graceful exercise in reinforced concrete that brilliantly exploited the material’s potential to be shaped and sculpted. In Rotterdam, Feyenoord’s stadium of 1937 embodied the functionalist ideals of the Dutch Nieuwe Bouwen (New Building) movement, with a lightweight, skeletal steel frame used to suspend the upper tier above the lower, offering an unimpeded view of the pitch, revolutionary for its time.
In a nice touch, the show’s thematic sections are denoted by custom designed football scarves in the zinging emerald green of grass under floodlights. In the part dedicated to Italia 90, graphic designer Alberto Burri’s definitive World Cup poster features a football pitch in Rome’s Colosseum, the ur-stadium and theoretical point of origin for all modern football grounds. Italy went large on its hosting duties, spending billions upgrading existing stadiums and constructing new ones, including a sunken bowl in Bari by the Genoese hi-tech architect Renzo Piano with structural ribs resembling a whale’s carcass.
Dominating proceedings like a giant wedding cake is a model of the San Siro in Milan. For Italia 90, an entirely new structure was built over the original 1926 stadium, incorporating red steel roof trusses supported by corkscrew-shaped circulation towers. Memorably, when crowds surge down the corkscrews, the towers appear to be spiralling, in a bizarre optical illusion. Though it remains the base of AC Milan and rivals Inter, after years of protracted wrangling, its days look to be numbered.
There are some surprising heirs to Archie Leitch. Though you might not think it, Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron are huge football aficionados with their firm producing some of the most radically inventive contemporary stadium designs. Fabricated from nearly 3,000 inflatable foil cushions impregnated with LED lighting, Bayern Munich’s Allianz Arena can instantly change the colour of its skin, like a colossal, glowing chameleon. And in Braga, in northern Portugal, Eduardo Souto de Moura set a stadium in a disused limestone quarry, a natural amphitheatre where a wayward shot on goal will rebound off a cliff face.
“Spaceship” is an overused epithet, but football stadiums do have an otherworldly aura, as modern colossi looming above huddled neighbourhoods, evocative of Philip Larkin’s “ships up streets”. Yet size isn’t necessarily everything. In Galashiels in Scotland, Gala Fairydean’s bijoux stand for 750 supporters resembles a piece of concrete origami, designed by Peter Womersley in 1965.
A pivotal moment was legislation for the development of all-seater grounds following the catastrophe of Hillsborough, its impact still resonating after nearly four decades. Before Hillsborough, 56 people died in the 1985 Bradford City stadium fire, in which the dilapidated main stand became an inferno within 270 seconds. Such disasters marked a hideous low point in British football history, showing how supporters were seen in a demeaning and dehumanised light by the authorities and how ageing structures had become rickety death traps.
Unimaginably removed from the era of seething crowds on acres of terraces, the future of football stadiums lies in being increasingly sustainable and flexible. After the retractable roof comes the retractable pitch, as at Tottenham Hotspur’s new ground by arena design specialists Populus, which can accommodate everything from concerts to American football.
Currently managed by former bad boy Robbie Savage, Forest Green Rovers may be minnows playing in the English league’s fifth tier, but have been described by Fifa as “the greenest team in the world”, demonstrating that a club can prioritise sustainability and still achieve success. Its proposal to build the world’s first all-timber stadium, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, will form the centrepiece of a new ecology park for the local community.
The growth of the women’s game is also destined to shape the stadiums of the future. American club Kansas City Current are the first to play in a purpose-built venue for women’s professional soccer, incorporating subtle design changes such as modified seating and sight-lines, all calculated to appeal to a more family-oriented fanbase.
The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner once said: “A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture.” For much of their history, football stadiums used to be more bike shed than cathedral but their time has now spectacularly come.
Home Ground: The Architecture of Football is at RIBA North, Liverpool and Tate Liverpool, 15 October to 25 January
