Manchester United FC™, once England’s leading football club, now its leading football-related corporate entertainment brand, has fallen on hard times over the past decade, with the current team dismissed as maybe the club’s worst ever by their manager, Ruben Amorim. The stadium isn’t in the best of shape right now, either: Old Trafford, United’s home since 1910, is in urgent need of repair, infested with rodents and having a roof even leakier than the team’s central defence.
As such, United’s new joint owner, petrochemicals billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe, has just announced plans to move into a replacement 100,000-seat stadium, at a projected cost of £2 billion (€2.39 billion).
Designed by leading British architecture firm Rogers + Partners, Ratcliffe boasts New Trafford (not its official name) “will be the world’s greatest football stadium,” citing what a cynic may call completely made-up figures to the effect that it will provide “£7billion per annum of value added to Manchester and the North [of England’s] economy because it would become like the Eiffel Tower.”
How so? Because, “When you go to Paris, you visit the Eiffel Tower,” and so, henceforth, whenever anyone with even the slightest interest in football visits Manchester, they will likewise inevitably visit New Trafford. But don’t most football fans visiting Manchester already visit Old Trafford anyway?
Manchester Piccadilly Circus
The very idea that a football stadium should act as a tourist attraction is in itself rather a suspect one. The traditional function of a football ground is to host a football team, with the traditional desire of fans being to watch their team play games of football, not to walk around casting admiring gazes at the architecture.
Perhaps with this fact in mind, Rogers + Partners have obligingly come up with a design which can only be admired by the functionally blind, a bizarre, three-pronged giant net cascading down over the enclosed ground itself, in a fashion most frequently compared to a circus tent, but which to me more closely resembles the minarets of a disused mosque cocooned all over in colossal spider-webs.
The net is described by its designers as “an umbrella,” a device often necessary when visiting Manchester, with its 104,000 square metre span designed to shelter a huge public plaza, planned to be filled with attractions like bars, hotels, restaurants, cinemas, shops, and maybe even a small, self-contained ‘YouTube Theatre’ mini-stadium to host pop concerts.
The basic concept is to utilise such facilities to increase what is called “dwell time” in the area—that is, fans are no longer expected simply to turn up to watch the actual game on a matchday and then go straight home, but to linger around caught up in the web all day long, spending even more money than their overpriced tickets cost.
Plans for the eyesore have not gone down well with many Manchester United fan groups. One of the biggest, The 1958, put out the following statement:
Manchester United’s new stadium design fails to reflect the club’s deep-rooted heritage, traditions, and connection to its supporters. Instead of embodying the gritty, historic essence of Old Trafford—a fortress built on generations of passion, emotion and belonging—the design resembles a generic, soulless corporate structure, more akin to a modern entertainment venue than a football cathedral … Rather than honouring the past and strengthening the bond with the local community, it prioritises spectacle over substance, alienating those who have defined United’s legacy for decades. It’s an events stadium over a football stadium. It’s a visitor experience over fan opinion and needs … Once again football is taking a backseat.
The trouble is, in protesting thus, The 1958 are not simply fighting back against an individual example of greedy and misguided owners, acting as poor stewards of their beloved club, but against a far wider pan-European trend of excessive stadium homogenisation and commercialisation—and of general continental cultural deracination in a wider societal sense.
Losing our collective souls and our continued sense of connection to our local areas, communities, identities, and heritage to be more easily replaced en masse by imported incomers is precisely what the globalists who run Europe these days want to happen to us, as expertly explained by Renaud Camus. The true nature of the wider game really being played here is not football at all; contrary to Bill Shankly’s famous old opinion on such matters, it’s far more important than that.
Grounds for disagreement
Beneath the big spidery freak sheet, United’s actual stadium building itself looks not too far away from most other big shiny new European stadiums these days—that is to say, a big quasi-circular metal bowl with a football pitch plonked haphazardly down in the middle, almost as an afterthought.
Many football grounds once used to look unique and immediately identifiable at first glance, as with the famous (and since demolished) twin towers of Wembley Stadium—but no longer. The reasons for this newfound proliferation of clone stadiums are manifold but often come down to sheer cost. Through years of trial and error, designers have found a basic design template which works, and from which it would now be considered cost-inefficient to deviate.
Perhaps most crucial has been the increasing transformation of football clubs from symbols and institutions of local pride into global brands, 95% of whose fanbases don’t actually hail from cities like Manchester at all. Hence, as Sir Jim Ratcliffe desires for New Trafford, stadiums now prioritise becoming gimmicky tourist traps designed not primarily for loyal local season-ticket-holders, but meant to attract plastic fans from Singapore, the United States or Malaysia to be tempted to fly in for a literal once-in-a-lifetime experience—giant nets and ‘YouTube Theatres’ included.
Green pitches
Growing ideological homogenisation across Europe is also playing its role in the corresponding architectural homogenisation of our stadiums.
Once upon a time, Europe’s football stadiums sold themselves on criteria such as being atmospheric, intimidating, or laden with layers upon layers of proud sporting history. Now, as in the case of Ajax FC and their Johan Cruyff ArenA in Amsterdam, they prefer to sell themselves on colourless PC terms like the following:
The [in-stadium battery-storage] system has a storage capacity of 2.8-megawatt hours—enough power to fully charge 500,000 smartphones—and with a lifecycle of more than ten years, it will save 116,693 tonnes of CO₂, providing benefits across the region and furthering the Netherlands’ low carbon ambitions. The arena also has 4,200 solar panels on its roof that can feed power to the battery system in the rack below, and is installing more and more bi-directional vehicle chargers in the car-park in anticipation of a popularity boom in electric cars.
Like Manchester United, Ajax have endured having one of their worst teams in living memory over recent years, but who needs any new trophies when you can have “4,200 solar panels” on your roof instead? That’s far better!
According to the ArenA’s Director of Innovation Henk van Raan, his football stadium is no longer just a football stadium, but, much more importantly, “the nucleus for urban development in Amsterdam … It’s in the interests of every stadium to be linked with citywide development, and renewable energy is a very important movement in which the stadium can play a role.”
In other words, it’s now “in the interests of every stadium” to be designed near-identically with corporate-political interests primarily in mind, not sporting interests anymore. Green interests, advertising interests, sponsorship interests, tourism interests, architectural interests, globalisation interests; anything, in fact, but boring, old-fashioned, and outdated football interests!
When he looks up at the soulless Green ArenA that now bears his name, appropriately enough, Johann Cruyff himself must be turning in his grave.
Europe United—in Dismal Modern-Day Corporate Football Stadium Design
United fans hold up banners during a demonstration against seat prices and the current ownership of Manchester United ahead of the English Premier League football match between Manchester United and Arsenal at Old Trafford on March 9, 2025.
Paul Ellis / AFP
Manchester United FC™, once England’s leading football club, now its leading football-related corporate entertainment brand, has fallen on hard times over the past decade, with the current team dismissed as maybe the club’s worst ever by their manager, Ruben Amorim. The stadium isn’t in the best of shape right now, either: Old Trafford, United’s home since 1910, is in urgent need of repair, infested with rodents and having a roof even leakier than the team’s central defence.
As such, United’s new joint owner, petrochemicals billionaire Sir Jim Ratcliffe, has just announced plans to move into a replacement 100,000-seat stadium, at a projected cost of £2 billion (€2.39 billion).
Designed by leading British architecture firm Rogers + Partners, Ratcliffe boasts New Trafford (not its official name) “will be the world’s greatest football stadium,” citing what a cynic may call completely made-up figures to the effect that it will provide “£7billion per annum of value added to Manchester and the North [of England’s] economy because it would become like the Eiffel Tower.”
How so? Because, “When you go to Paris, you visit the Eiffel Tower,” and so, henceforth, whenever anyone with even the slightest interest in football visits Manchester, they will likewise inevitably visit New Trafford. But don’t most football fans visiting Manchester already visit Old Trafford anyway?
Manchester Piccadilly Circus
The very idea that a football stadium should act as a tourist attraction is in itself rather a suspect one. The traditional function of a football ground is to host a football team, with the traditional desire of fans being to watch their team play games of football, not to walk around casting admiring gazes at the architecture.
Perhaps with this fact in mind, Rogers + Partners have obligingly come up with a design which can only be admired by the functionally blind, a bizarre, three-pronged giant net cascading down over the enclosed ground itself, in a fashion most frequently compared to a circus tent, but which to me more closely resembles the minarets of a disused mosque cocooned all over in colossal spider-webs.
The net is described by its designers as “an umbrella,” a device often necessary when visiting Manchester, with its 104,000 square metre span designed to shelter a huge public plaza, planned to be filled with attractions like bars, hotels, restaurants, cinemas, shops, and maybe even a small, self-contained ‘YouTube Theatre’ mini-stadium to host pop concerts.
The basic concept is to utilise such facilities to increase what is called “dwell time” in the area—that is, fans are no longer expected simply to turn up to watch the actual game on a matchday and then go straight home, but to linger around caught up in the web all day long, spending even more money than their overpriced tickets cost.
Plans for the eyesore have not gone down well with many Manchester United fan groups. One of the biggest, The 1958, put out the following statement:
The trouble is, in protesting thus, The 1958 are not simply fighting back against an individual example of greedy and misguided owners, acting as poor stewards of their beloved club, but against a far wider pan-European trend of excessive stadium homogenisation and commercialisation—and of general continental cultural deracination in a wider societal sense.
Losing our collective souls and our continued sense of connection to our local areas, communities, identities, and heritage to be more easily replaced en masse by imported incomers is precisely what the globalists who run Europe these days want to happen to us, as expertly explained by Renaud Camus. The true nature of the wider game really being played here is not football at all; contrary to Bill Shankly’s famous old opinion on such matters, it’s far more important than that.
Grounds for disagreement
Beneath the big spidery freak sheet, United’s actual stadium building itself looks not too far away from most other big shiny new European stadiums these days—that is to say, a big quasi-circular metal bowl with a football pitch plonked haphazardly down in the middle, almost as an afterthought.
Many football grounds once used to look unique and immediately identifiable at first glance, as with the famous (and since demolished) twin towers of Wembley Stadium—but no longer. The reasons for this newfound proliferation of clone stadiums are manifold but often come down to sheer cost. Through years of trial and error, designers have found a basic design template which works, and from which it would now be considered cost-inefficient to deviate.
Perhaps most crucial has been the increasing transformation of football clubs from symbols and institutions of local pride into global brands, 95% of whose fanbases don’t actually hail from cities like Manchester at all. Hence, as Sir Jim Ratcliffe desires for New Trafford, stadiums now prioritise becoming gimmicky tourist traps designed not primarily for loyal local season-ticket-holders, but meant to attract plastic fans from Singapore, the United States or Malaysia to be tempted to fly in for a literal once-in-a-lifetime experience—giant nets and ‘YouTube Theatres’ included.
Green pitches
Growing ideological homogenisation across Europe is also playing its role in the corresponding architectural homogenisation of our stadiums.
Once upon a time, Europe’s football stadiums sold themselves on criteria such as being atmospheric, intimidating, or laden with layers upon layers of proud sporting history. Now, as in the case of Ajax FC and their Johan Cruyff ArenA in Amsterdam, they prefer to sell themselves on colourless PC terms like the following:
Like Manchester United, Ajax have endured having one of their worst teams in living memory over recent years, but who needs any new trophies when you can have “4,200 solar panels” on your roof instead? That’s far better!
According to the ArenA’s Director of Innovation Henk van Raan, his football stadium is no longer just a football stadium, but, much more importantly, “the nucleus for urban development in Amsterdam … It’s in the interests of every stadium to be linked with citywide development, and renewable energy is a very important movement in which the stadium can play a role.”
In other words, it’s now “in the interests of every stadium” to be designed near-identically with corporate-political interests primarily in mind, not sporting interests anymore. Green interests, advertising interests, sponsorship interests, tourism interests, architectural interests, globalisation interests; anything, in fact, but boring, old-fashioned, and outdated football interests!
When he looks up at the soulless Green ArenA that now bears his name, appropriately enough, Johann Cruyff himself must be turning in his grave.
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