Suddenly the point was gone. And it almost looked ridiculous how a few people, pinhead-size viewed from above, were doing their sport in those huge empty concrete bowls at the bottom of the lawn. A huge building, erected for tens of millions of euros, made for 60,000 or 70,000 people, in which a maximum of 200 people now reside and the echo of the “continue, continue” calls is broken in the echo of the steep walls.
The announcer makes his goal announcements, but for whom? The oversized display boards light up, but there is no one to look at them. At Union Berlin they have gone over to completely foregoing the stadium announcer at home games. A goal falls, brief, frugal jubilation, then there is a central impetus, and we continue.
Suddenly the place is only draughty, uncomfortable, uncultivated, gray, lifeless. Not even a corner where you can comfortably drink a coffee. Only absurd that one sometimes speaks of such stadiums as the “living room of a club”. A spooky place for the ghost games of pandemic times. A huge architectural wasteland, “basically not only inhospitable but also almost martial architecture,” says Robin Kähler.
Focused solely on the event
Kähler has seen hundreds of stadiums in his life, he’s not a groundhopper, but it has become part of his job, so to speak. The sports scientist, who worked for many years at the universities in Mannheim and Kiel, is chairman of the International Working Group for Sports and Leisure Facilities IAKS, he advises numerous municipalities such as the city of Cologne on the construction of sports facilities, and he is not at all surprised that the large arenas in the Corona time so openly reveal their hostile side.
Where are they running?
Photo:
Roland Weihrauch / DPA
“These are demand systems, entertainment goods, highly functional, geared solely towards the event,” says Kähler. And thus exactly the opposite of what he imagines as a good sports facility in the city. A facility that is more like a campus, ideally in the middle of the city, as a place “where everything can take place: from sports events to day-care centers to cafeterias”. But above all, a place where people in the city get the opportunity to move around, free spaces, free spaces.
“Instead, we built islands, closed to the population, often buildings that are primarily competitive sports venues that can be used unilaterally and often only serve the profiling of cities,” says Kähler, purely functional buildings for a small number of professional athletes. Islands, completely isolated from the mainland during the Corona period, so to speak. A hard Brexit for sports architecture. The professionals are just among themselves, but they could just as easily do it on the training ground next door. Real Madrid has moved in the pandemic and is playing its home games at the Estadio Alfredo di Stéfano in Valdebebas on the outskirts of the Spanish capital. Capacity 6000 spectators. The famous Bernabéu Stadium is empty at this time and is being rebuilt. At least the myth of the stadium is preserved. But then there are Champions League games in a stadium for 6,000 spectators. Corona has already done that with big football.
A spaceship in a moon-like landscape
Some of the new arenas are now in front of the city, such as the Stade de France in, or better, near Paris, such as the Bayern Arena in Fröttmaning, a spaceship in a moon-like landscape on the motorway. Logistic, mostly car-friendly, rational decisions in order to better control and manage traffic flows and safety concepts. Once or twice a week tens of thousands are carted there, after three hours the whole caravan moves back again. With the price that in the pandemic these areas seem even more orphaned, even more remote. It usually buzzes there on match days, now there is hardly any S-Bahn or U-Bahn going in the evening after floodlit games. Thrown back into nothing.
“Sport must serve the city, not the other way around,” says the scientist. A rethink in the construction of sports facilities is needed, he hopes that new spaces will be opened up when cities re-plan mobility, car traffic and parking spaces are outsourced. “Framework conditions must be created that stimulate people so that it is fun to move around the city,” says Kähler.
When it comes to large-scale buildings for the Olympic Games and soccer tournaments, people like to dismiss the “white elephants”, stadiums that are hardly used after the event in Ukraine, Brazil, China, Russia that cost millions and then largely in the Standing around. Empty of meaning, at most suitable as a warning sign for megalomania. In the pandemic, Germany also has its white elephants in a certain sense: They are called Allianz Arena, Veltins Arena, Bay Arena, Signal Iduna Park.
