The Stadiums Football Lost

Football stadiums were never designed to become memories. They became them simply by surviving long enough. A stadium begins as a piece of infrastructure. Concrete, steel, seats, floodlights, entrances, turnstiles. Something designed to get thousands of people into the same place, watch the same game and then get them out again.

But football has a habit of making ordinary places significant.

A stadium becomes the place where someone saw their first match. Where a father took his son. Where friends met every weekend for twenty years. Where a club won something nobody expected. Where someone stood in the rain, in the cold, in the same seat, on the same street, season after season.

Then, eventually, the building becomes a problem. It is too old. Too small. Too expensive to maintain. Impossible to expand. Difficult to make safe. It cannot generate enough revenue. The land is worth more than the building.

And so the question becomes unavoidable: What is a football club supposed to preserve when the place that holds its history no longer works?

Why Football Had to Leave Its Old Stadiums

Look at some of the most famous stadiums that disappeared and the reasons are rarely mysterious.

Arsenal left Highbury because the ground could no longer provide the capacity and commercial possibilities the club needed. Wembley was eventually replaced by a completely new stadium. The old San Mamés, White Hart Lane, Maine Road, Råsunda and countless others followed different versions of the same story.

The reasons were usually practical. Football became safer. Regulations changed. Standing disappeared from many grounds. Accessibility standards improved. Supporters expected better facilities. Clubs wanted more seats, better hospitality, larger concourses and more opportunities to generate revenue.

The old football ground was often an accident of its time. A stand squeezed into a tiny urban plot. A terrace built when standing was normal. A roof designed for another era. A railway line on one side. A pub on another. Pieces added over decades without anyone imagining what the completed building might eventually look like.

Some of these places were beautiful. Many were not. And that is important. The argument for preserving old stadiums cannot simply be that everything old was better. It wasn't. Some old grounds were uncomfortable, inefficient and increasingly difficult to operate.

Modern football solved many of those problems. The more interesting question is not whether the new stadium is better. It is: Better at what?

The Old Stadium Was Shaped by Its Neighbourhood

One of the things that made old football grounds distinctive was that they rarely existed in isolation. They were part of a neighbourhood, a local community, a town or a city.

You walked through residential streets to reach them. You passed the same pub. You crossed the same road. You bought a hot dog from the same place. The stadium might have been surrounded by houses, shops, railway tracks, industrial buildings or whatever happened to be there when the ground was first built.

The architecture adapted to the city. Sometimes badly. Sometimes brilliantly. A strange corner, an unusually steep stand or a tiny entrance could be the result of nothing more sophisticated than the fact that somebody had to fit a football stadium into the space that was available.

But those limitations created individuality. The modern stadium begins from a different premise. It is increasingly designed as a complete system: circulation, hospitality, premium seating, retail, media facilities, accessibility, security, parking, corporate space and revenue generation.

The old stadium was often shaped by its neighbourhood. The modern stadium is increasingly shaped by its business model. That does not automatically make one better than the other. But it does make them different.

And perhaps that difference explains why so many modern stadiums can feel strangely interchangeable, while even imperfect old grounds could be immediately recognisable.

When Football Became a Business, Architecture Changed

The modern stadium is no longer simply a container for football. It is an asset.

A club can sell more seats. Charge more for premium seating. Build hospitality areas, host concerts, rent conference rooms, operate restaurants and retail spaces, or sell naming rights. Develop the surrounding land. A stadium can work seven days a week instead of ninety minutes every other weekend.

This logic is difficult to argue against. Football is expensive. Players are expensive. Maintenance is expensive. Ambition is expensive. The stadium therefore has to do more. And as it does, every part of it becomes measurable. How many seats? How much revenue per spectator? How many hospitality places? How efficiently can supporters move through the concourses? How many events can be hosted? How much commercial space can be created?

This is where architecture begins to collide with memory. Because memory is inefficient. A strange corner has no obvious financial value. A narrow staircase does not increase revenue. A pub that has been there for generations does not appear on the club's balance sheet.

The awkwardness of an old stadium may be precisely what made it memorable. Modern football has become very good at removing awkwardness. The question is what else disappears with it.

The New Stadium Is Not Always the Answer

But there is another side to the story. Sometimes a club does not have to choose between modernisation and history.

Liverpool is one of the clearest examples. The club spent years considering a move from Anfield to a new stadium in Stanley Park. In 2012, Liverpool instead announced its preference to remain at Anfield and redevelop the existing ground.

The decision was not simply an act of nostalgia. It was an alternative strategy. Instead of abandoning the place and starting again, Liverpool chose to make the place work harder. Anfield could be expanded. Its infrastructure could be improved. Accessibility could be upgraded. Hospitality could be developed. Capacity could increase. And the club could keep the thing a new stadium could never manufacture: Anfield itself.

Liverpool's later redevelopment plans explicitly made preserving the atmosphere and historical character of the stadium part of the design logic. The four individual stands were retained as a reference to the stadium's historical evolution.

That is an important counterexample to the idea that progress always requires replacement. Sometimes the most modern solution is not to build somewhere else. Sometimes it is to rebuild what already exists. The choice is not always: old or new. Sometimes it is: replace the place, or reinvent it.

When Your Own Stadium Becomes History

I am not writing about this entirely from a safe distance. I am watching two old football stadiums disappear from my own city.

One has already gone. Kranjčevićeva Stadium, one of Zagreb's historic football grounds, is being replaced by a new stadium. The old structure had become increasingly difficult to reconcile with the requirements of modern football. Now the concrete is gone and something new is rising in its place.

The other is Maksimir. The current plan is for the existing stadium to be removed from 2027, with a new stadium planned for the site. And again, it is not difficult to understand why.

Maksimir has become a building defined as much by its problems as by its history. Its condition has been debated for years. Parts of the stadium have been unusable since the Zagreb earthquake. The eastern stand has remained closed, while the stadium's infrastructure has increasingly struggled to meet the expectations placed upon a modern home for Dinamo Zagreb and Croatian football.

There is nothing romantic about that reality. A football stadium should be safe. It should work. It should be accessible. It should be capable of hosting modern football without every match becoming a negotiation with the limitations of the building.

And yet I can look at Maksimir and understand all of that while still feeling something about its disappearance. That contradiction is difficult to explain unless you have lived with a stadium.

You know the concrete is old. You know the infrastructure is inadequate. You know a new stadium will be better. And still, when you imagine the old one no longer being there, you feel the loss.

Nostalgia Is Not the Same as Preservation

This is where the argument about old stadiums becomes more complicated. You can believe that a stadium should be demolished and still mourn its disappearance.

Those two positions are not contradictory. Nostalgia does not necessarily mean wanting the past to remain physically intact. Sometimes it simply means recognising that something mattered before it became obsolete.

I do not think Kranjčevićeva needed to survive forever simply because people had memories there. I do not think Maksimir can remain unchanged forever simply because generations of Dinamo Zagreb supporters grew up with it.

Football cannot live entirely inside its past.

Clubs need better infrastructure. Supporters deserve better facilities. Players deserve proper working conditions. Cities need stadiums that can function as modern public spaces. The problem begins when we confuse functionality with meaning.

And Zagreb has already seen this happen before. Before Maksimir became Dinamo's permanent home, the club played at the old ground in Koturaška Street. The stadium was opened in 1924 by Građanski, the club from which Dinamo emerged, on the site where the HEP building stands today. Dinamo continued playing there after the Second World War, before moving permanently to Maksimir in 1948.

Today, almost nobody remembers that Koturaška stadium. There is no football ground there anymore. There is a HEP office building. And on its façade, there is now a small commemorative plaque marking the place where Građanski's stadium once stood. It was installed in 2024, exactly one hundred years after the ground opened.

That is the strange thing about football memory. A place can once be the centre of a club's world and, a few generations later, become a footnote on a wall. Perhaps that is what will eventually happen to Maksimir, too. Perhaps fifty years from now, someone will stand where the stadium once stood and point out that this was where Dinamo played for generations. Someone may remember the floodlights, the terraces, the atmosphere, the walk to the ground. Or perhaps they won't. Perhaps there will be only a plaque.

And that thought changes the way you look at an old stadium before it disappears. Not because it means the building should necessarily be saved, but because it reminds you that we never really know which parts of the present will survive as memory, and which will become almost invisible.

The Price of Making Every Seat Count

Modern football has good reasons to optimise its stadiums. But optimisation has a visual and cultural consequence. When every seat must be counted, awkward stands become problems. When every square metre must generate value, unused spaces become opportunities. When circulation must be efficient, strange entrances disappear. When a stadium must accommodate hospitality, media, retail, concerts and corporate events, its architecture begins to follow a global language.

The result is not necessarily bad architecture. It is simply architecture with fewer accidents. And accidents are often where character comes from. The old football ground was not always designed beautifully. It was designed, extended, repaired, compromised and adapted.

Its identity emerged slowly. A modern stadium is usually designed all at once. Its identity has to be designed into it. That may be the deepest difference between the two. The old stadium acquired character. The new stadium has to manufacture it. And manufactured character is never quite the same thing.

When a Place Becomes a Memory

Eventually, Kranjčevićeva will become a memory. Maksimir will become one too. There will be new stands, new entrances, new seats and new generations who will never understand why the old stadiums looked the way they did.

They will not remember the uncomfortable seats. They will not remember the broken concrete. They will not remember the parts that no longer worked. They will remember their own stadium. That is how football survives. It does not preserve every place. It creates another one.

I will probably watch a match in the new Kranjčevićeva very soon. I will probably watch Dinamo in a new Maksimir, too. And eventually, those stadiums will become ordinary to the people who grow up with them. They will have their own seats, their own entrances, their own rituals and their own memories.

Football has always been very good at building new memories. It has never been quite as good at destroying the old ones. I know why Kranjčevićeva had to go. I understand why Maksimir cannot continue indefinitely in its present form. I can look at both buildings and see all the reasons for replacing them. And still, when they disappear, I will miss them.