This is the final part of the four-part series.
Part One // Part Two // Part Three // Part Four
don't give me pretty - scare them witless!
The purpose of design studies is to look
at what-ifs. They are not designs. They are potential solutions to
issues in the design. The studies here are based on publicly available
information. They do not have the benefit of a detailed survey, for
example. But they are enough to look at the issues in principle.
It’s also important to look at the
long-term future. Whatever we do now should not lock us out of what we
might want in the future. But ‘future-proofing’ for forever is
enormously difficult (and expensive). Every study should look at what it
means for the ground in 10, 20, 30 or 50 years time.
Safety and regulations are rightly
onerous. There are regulations and guidelines for refurbishment and for
new and for both together. Anfield has some of the highest standards and
one of the most respected stadium managers in the country. There cannot
be any compromises of safety for cost. None.
It is therefore of the utmost importance
to ensure that the existing stadium is not compromised by the new parts
and that both meet the requirements of the legislation. As with any
extension or expansion of any building this is subject to agreement with
local building control. As important is compliance with Health &
Safety regulations. Day one of any design process.
The first step is in any event to get a
brief together. Perhaps parts of it can be derived (hence the previous
million words) but right now, there isn’t one. FSG have their own
financial and development criteria. The following is subject to all of
that (and more).
***
WE LOVE ANFIELD
There’s a lot of sentiment washing around
Anfield. It is after all our not-so-secret weapon in a tight corner.
With our backs to the wall. 12th man and all that. And it is, or it can
be.
And it does have a value as a sub-brand
to the brand. Liverpool playing at Anfield is an event sold around the
world. That makes a global difference.
But that barely registers at home. A
redevelopment of Anfield at half the cost and ‘roughly the same income’
is just a hugely different financial story. A world better than a new
stadium even with naming rights.
***
You can expect a surplus from a
redeveloped Anfield as soon as it’s finished – not 15 more years away.
It covers costs and makes a surplus. A redevelopment makes our money –
the money we spend in the ground and that we spend to get into the
ground – available for the club. It doesn’t bleed our back pockets for
the benefit of a bank. Who wants to go back to that?!
Not only that but the surplus increases
as each part of it is finished. And it could happen very quickly. There
are any number of ways to go. Depending on circumstances and financial
strategy. It’s flexible. You can stop when you’ve got enough. you can
keep going if you need more.
For a quick hit the club might focus on
higher earning premium seats at the outset (the peak revenue per seat is
at about 51,000). Not so good for the cheap seats at first but as it
grows, and the revenue increases, the scope and financial leeway for
cheaper seats and family and kids’ deals increases.
Upgraded seats could be ready in August.
Hospitality suites at the same time. They could be earning money before a
new stadium is even up.
Anfield could take an early lead with
both cashflow and with revenue. A dual lead from which a new stadium
might never ever recover. It could continue to net more than a new
stadium all the way through the crucial medium term and make it to the
‘debt-free’ long term, sooner.
Anfield could beat a new stadium
financially every step of the way. That is why it is the preferred
option. Not because we love it (but we do – mostly…).
***
It’s also worth remembering that of the
top ten richest clubs, seven have a redeveloped stadium. Three of the
‘finest’ stadia in Europe – The Bernabéu, Camp Nou and San Siro are all
redevelopments. As is one of the most lucrative – Old Trafford. For
whatever reason, two – Stamford Bridge and White Hart Lane – are
struggling to make a new stadium work, even in London.
***
PRACTICALITIES AND DIFFICULTIES
There are design issues and practical
working difficulties. The existing Anfield Road End is absolutely tight
to the back of pavement line (and is severely compromised as a result)
and the club have been involved in the rehabilitation of properties
behind the Centenary stand only relatively recently – so don’t look
there. Walton Breck Road runs directly behind the Kop and is a
significant thoroughfare. The Main Stand is hemmed in by (derelict)
properties.
However, there is room for some expansion
behind the Kop and a lot behind the Anfield Road End where properties
have now been cleared. And over the Main Stand car park. (for
hospitality suites at low level).
The views are generally very good (some
are very bad). The roof focusses the sound of the fans onto the pitch
and everyone enjoys an intimacy with the action and an intense
atmosphere.
The pitch itself is 4m too short for
European football and lacks the necessary surrounding margin. Play takes
place in those competitions by covering over several of the front rows
of seating. On the other hand the proximity to the pitch is an important
part of the atmosphere particularly in domestic competitions.
***
courtesy of ©Stuart Roy Clarke/www.homesoffootball.co.uk
The work can progress all-year around
behind the existing stands. All the way up to and including roof level
with turnstiles access at ground level protected by a deck built in the
first closed season. Street level circulation and access for fans,
coaches, valet parking and outside broadcast vehicles will run under the
deck. The roof over the existing stands can be replaced in the last
closed season. It would take two years to extend each stand and one
stand opened every year after that.
So there need not be any loss of revenue
in all that time. And you need only look back to realise that that is
exactly how the Upper Centenary Stand was built.
***
Legroom is an issue. People are getting
bigger. Of course you can’t build a new stadium for the very largest (or
the very smallest). But the regulations are following the trend to
larger seats.
For the average bloke in a new stadium
this means the ‘crowd’ is getting less packed. But ‘being in it (closer)
together’ is important to atmosphere. Sitting at Wembley can be like being at home with your mum.
The more space there is for each seat,
the bigger the whole stand and the more expensive it is. A completely
new stand would be about 25% bigger than an existing one of the same
capacity. That’s at least an increase in prices of 30% right there (we
want to make a surplus right?)
Then there’s the land needed. The bigger
the stand, the more land needed. Again, the higher the ticket price. If
we need one street to simply add to what we’ve got, we could need two to
completely rebuild.
You might take the view that there would
be so little left of the Anfield Road End that it would be worth going
the whole hog and demolishing the lot. It would certainly be easier to
extend the pitch. Construction could be sequenced to build the expansion
of the Anfield Road End before removing and replacing the existing (so
that revenue can be maintained throughout). And since that land is
seemingly under the control of the club, it’s a fair point.
The Main Stand is different. The whole
stand can be kept and control of the land behind the Main Stand is not
as straight forward. And then there’s still the cost… a better way could
be to add enough seats and upgrade what we need.
Either way is possible. We get what we pay for and we could lose what we like. The closeness and the intensity.
***
Outside of the financial commitment to
£65k each a year, boxes are a waste of money. The price per head is the
same as some premium seats and I don’t think we can sell many more. All
those lifts, extra floor and ‘executive tier’, separate toilets and
building them and pushing up the cost of the stadium itself…
But if boxes is want you want, boxes can
be accommodated within the existing structure with outside seats (just
like the Centenary Stand). As many boxes as you like really.
There’s hardly a practical limited. But 140 would give us the same ratio to capacity as Old Trafford.
***
A LONGER DAY
It’s
all a bit weird in a box. I’d rather be able to eat and drink with
mates before and after the game. I’d much rather bump into people I
haven’t seen for a while, than be shut away in a box. Going to the match
is a social event. In fact, most of us spend most of the time in the
pub. We are used to turning up five minutes before kick-off. A quick pee
and maybe a pie at half time and shooting straight off back to the pub
after the final whistle.
Straight off to post-match interviews in
the pub and replays, Match of the Day and bed. Fifteen minutes on top of
the ninety and we’re gone. Not the three hours of Baseball or even the
four of NFL.
And it’s hard to sit together where you used to stand together.
But if the pub is the culture, the
stadium can bring the pub into the ground. Space to have a beer, go to
the chippie, enjoy a meal – inside the ground. Watch the game before.
See the replays after – extending the ‘core experience’ – the TV
schedules are made for it. A real day of it – the whole mates and pub
thing – but inside the ground. An hour before and maybe one or two
after.
There is plenty of room under the new
sections of stand. In fact there’s enough room for a seat at a table or a
place for a drink under the stand for every seat in it, plus more
‘stand-up’ bars, a concourse and parking! Up to three floors directly
accessible behind three stands (no, the Kop can stick with the pies – if
you want a glass of wine in the kop, you need to take a good look at
yourself) with food and drink stands, snack bars, sports bars, sky bars,
fancy restaurants, ‘hospitality suites’ all looking over wall-size TV
screens.
If you want it, there’s room for it, you can have it. If it’ll pay, it’ll be there.
***
DESIGN STUDIES
Many, many studies of individual pieces of the design have been boiled down to three options.
In all three, all of the obstructed views
would go. The Main Stand would have a new column-free roof. All of the
corner roof supports would go. The Anfield Road End would be built over
the existing roadway and great as the views are, the upper tier would go
to make that possible. And with it, the shockingly poor views at the
back of the Lower Anfield Road End. There are two procedural ways to do
that. Via the Highways Agency or via Planning. The nearest example is
Union Road (Old Trafford).
In a go-for-it world, the Kop could
similarly be extended backwards to Walton Breck Road or even in part,
cantilevered over it. But anyway, back in the more immediate future…
***
Better than minimum sightlines (‘c-values’) are achieved throughout.
The existing c-values are in some cases
just acceptable, just. Adding more seats would kill them. Two birds with
one stone… raising the pitch (by a small amount) means you can make the
pitch bigger to meet UEFA standards (hard to explain but obvious if you
think about it) and you can alter the viewing angle so that seats can
be added. For those at the back of the Upper Centenary it would also
make it slightly closer.
There are two sets of arcs set out to
define maximum and optimum viewing distance. The inner circle is the
‘optimum’ – a set distance from the centre spot. Boxes should aim to be
about or within this distance. The four outer arcs are the recommended
maximum. Most bigger capacity stadia are up to and in some cases over
this maximum.
Keeping the existing seats at Anfield
means that most of the viewing distances can be well within the UEFA
recommended maximum. Something to consider from the back of the
Centenary Stand.
***
Clearly you’ll get what you pay for for
legroom and those with improved seats will no doubt be asked to pay the
improvement price. But you can upgrade all of the seats at Anfield if
you want to.
There would be no major structural
implications and it can be done without closing a stand down. The
‘trick’ is a lightweight alteration of the steps on top of the existing
steps. Like an ‘overshoe’. That and the carefully manipulation of the
dimensions that go into the calculation of sightlines to produce an
acceptable result. The technology would be similar to that used to
convert standing areas to seating areas in Germany (not
‘safe-standing’).
***
As said, boxes aren’t worth the candle.
But you can have hundreds of boxes if you want. The right height is at
the optimum viewing distance or just over half way up the main stand.
The highest prices are in line with the halfway line. The lowest in the
ends. Looking at it now, all the boxes could come out but the studies
show they can be there if needed.
***
And to an extent you can play mix and
match between the options (between two of them anyway). Only Option B
is mutually exclusive.
Option B is
a flash-in-the-pan. The swirling lines and sloping roof are to impress
and inspire. But it’s stupidly expensive. Very little value for its
60,000 capacity. It’s the curved lines of seating terraces and inclined
oval roof. The whole roof is cantilevered from behind the stands and can
be prefabricated in a kit of parts but no chance of getting built. It
does however go some way to answer the question, what-if money (almost)
didn’t matter. more images for Option B
Option A is
a straight up and down, get as much in for the least cost. Thank you
very much. Job done. Except it’s not quite big enough (capacity just
under 60,000) and couldn’t be without taking stuff down and going again.
But with elements of Option C it could be increased to the club’s
‘sweet spot’ of 60,000 to 65,000. more images for Option AIn that respect Option C is better…
Option C is
for a big future and a careful present. The stadium would be expanded
stand-by-stand until demand is met – at 50k, 60k, 70k, 80k or even a
wildly ambitious 90k. The end of that road might not ever be reached but
nothing done now would stop us getting there more images for Option C
***
LEARNING FROM ANFIELD (and Westfalen and Wembley)
We all believe that UK stadium regulations are some of the most overtly safe there are and there is every good reason for that.
But
the combination of regulation and commercial model produces
excruciatingly dull stadia. The soulless bowls. The combination of safe
viewing calculation and the infamous ‘ring of silence’ (lower tier,
boxes, upper tier) produces low, laid back design. The increase in
height produced by the boxes pushes the lower tier down and as a result
further away from the pitch.
UEFA guidelines (and FIFA’s, more so)
push the fans away from the pitch and are making the seats themselves
bigger and the legroom bigger. As the footprint of the stadium gets
bigger and bigger, so does the roof. As it does so and unless you’ve got
the budget for a close-able roof, it gets lighter and lighter. And as
it gets bigger and bigger per seat, it gets more and more expensive to
pay for a ticket. The facts of stadium economics and affordability.
The heavier intimidating roof is one of
the reasons why everybody likes the Millenium Stadium (and less so the
lighter, dainty Emirates).
***
On
the other hand, everybody loves Westfalen Stadium – a real ‘football
ground’. Apparently steep. Close to the pitch. Big, cohesive sections of
stand. In fact, just a bit like Anfield.
It is a redevelopment and most
significantly expanded and re-roofed for the World Cups in 1974 and
2006. But it is built on a completely different financial model. It is
cheaper to get in and there are less ‘corporate whizzbangs’. It’s a
model which puts the fans first and matchday revenue second. To make
that happen, it puts greater effort into commercial revenues. In short,
it has few of the things that are killing our football grounds.
We’ve been to the Emirates and now that
we’ve been to Wembley, we know we’re not that keen on modern stadia in
the UK. Even if one of them did cost £890m.
***
Even the old Wembley was a ‘difficult’ place to sing a song.
The well-known or single-word chants can
work The set-piece Fields of Anfield Road or YNWA would have worked at
the peaks of excitement. But your average (or averagely complicated)
getting-the-team-going Scouser Tommy or the one-off witticism – forget
it.
The old Wembley was too big. Singing
mates split up by ticket allocation or jumping from section to section
to get back together and the long echoes all around and in between.
***
The new Wembley is impressive –
certainly. The views – good. It’s got a nice arch (because it matters…).
Atmosphere? Singing? … so much worse. Yet it gets away with it because
of the occasion. It’s always a big deal.
For all its failings the old Wembley was in big chunks. A big crowd. A mass of people.
The new Wembley is in bits. Section this.
Section that. Sections miles apart and seats miles apart. And the whole
thing split into Lower, Executive and Upper by the infamous ‘ring of
silence’. The prawn-sandwich brigade. The private boxes. Just like the
Emirates.
And actually, and as a result, the views
are not that good. Putting private boxes into modern calculations of
sightlines produces a god-awful geometry for the ordinary joe. The lower
tier is too low and the upper tier is too far away.
The top of the lower tier is
going on for level with the back of the old Wembley. There used to 39
steps to the Royal Box. Now there are 107 – go figure.
***
But
Wembley has a ‘trick’. The trick is to have a very deep lower tier and a
very big margin around the pitch. This means the middle and upper tier
can oversail the tier below to a significant degree. It means the height
is immense (there are no Lower Anfield Road end views at Wembley) but
it also means that the front edges of the tiers are closer to being
directly above one another.
So the whole stadium looks steeper even
though it’s not. The penalty is viewing distance. Not only on the
horizontal but up in the air. All that takes, to do is money. £890m.
One other thing. There aren’t that many
boxes. There’s a huge lesson there. The ‘Bobby Moore (hospitality)
Suite’ is massive but there are no boxes to it.
***
So for those without that kind of billion
to spend, the boxes and the rules have changed the experience. We sit
in low-slung boring stadia like the Emirates (and no, we can’t have the
steep tiers of Spain, or Italy. The rules are different).
We aren’t the 12th man any more. We’re
armchair critics. Apparently we are the sort of people that need
over-weaning announcers and song sheets and probably plastic flags. And
this it seems is the way the FA and UEFA and FIFA like it and the way
they like stadia to be designed. They do not want participation. They
want spectators. Sit down, pay up and shut up.
***
But figure this. We must have boxes to make a new stadium work back at Anfield. Actually no.
Boxes only produce about 5% of ‘gate’
money at a very disproportionate cost. Not only to build them (with
their lifts and carpets, individual toilets and parking and service
pantries and corridors and special floors) but also because they push up
the overall height and strength of the structure.
And when you work out the ticket price of
a box per head, it can be about the same as a premium seat hospitality
package. So, same income from a box but more cost and a stadium and
atmosphere cut in two by a ring of silence. Next.
***
If
you’re going to build new, forget the HKS design (the one that brought
the design ‘up to date’ ie., with boxes added, lower tiers lowered and
NFL injected). Forget the second AFL design and even the first, the 2003
design.
If you’re going to build new, forget the
boxes. Drop the small sections of seating. Lower the cost, maybe (I
wish) lower the prices. Produce large sections of seating at steeper
angles. Ok, far enough from the pitch to keep UEFA happy but two fingers
to FIFA and their ten metres (how much additional cost for maybe two
World Cup games in a life time?)
Stick with the minimum legroom (still
more than we have now) and the minimum seat width. Provide much, much
better food, beverage and hospitality facilities for all. Make the day
longer. Build a more compact, lower, flatter and more rectilinear roof
to keep in the sound. Make sure every fan can see every other fan. ‘Lean
in’ to the pitch. Get close and in your face and scare the opposition
witless. Prettiness we don’t need. Intimidation is what we want.
What would it look like? A bit like the Millennium Stadium, a lot like Westfalen. Perhaps even a bit like Anfield.
***
But if you want to redevelop, we’re already two-thirds of the way there.
http://www.thisisanfield.com/2012/04/anfield-redevelopment-part-4-greater-anfield/
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