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In the last issue, we took a look at the brilliant new stadium in Mallorca, and this time we’ve devoted three pages to some of the many excellent new and rebuilt grounds on the Spanish mainland. But we haven’t neglected the rest of the continent and we start with some sad news from Belgium. Having said before that the wave of Belgian mergers and ground-moves rarely resulted in the loss of a ground, we have to report on the demolition of a fine old venue belonging to a club which hasn’t even merged. The Stade Michel Soulier (pictured in magazine), home since 1931 to UR Namur, has been swallowed up by the large hospital which overlooked the east end of the ground. A homely venue wedged between the River Meuse and a main railway, the ground could only hold about 5,000 on its crumbling terraces, but it’s a sad loss for the fans of the club. Just relegated to Division 4, UR Namur will move in with town rivals Racing Wallonia Saint Servais, who play at the Stade des Bas-Pres on the opposite side of this charming town. Elsewhere in Belgium, several mergers have gone through over the closed season, perhaps the most notable being that of fallen giants KSV Waregem (UEFA Cup Semi-Finalists in 1986) with nearby Division 3 outfit Zultse VV. The merger secures the future of football at the impressive 13,000-capacity Regenboog Stadion in Waregem. In Italy, Serie A clubs continue to espouse grand plans for new privately-owned stadia without so much as laying a single brick. Our correspondent Fabrizio Pugi has noted that no progress whatsoever has been made on new stadiums for Fiorentina, Juventus, Venezia, Cagliari and Brescia, despite announcements having been made by these clubs in the last two years. However, there have been important developments in Rome, where a court has blocked the auction of the Foro Italico, the complex which includes the Olympic Stadium and the unusual Stadio dei Marmi. Roma and Lazio were expected to make a joint bid for the stadium, but the new Government, led by Silvio Berlusconi, is thought to want to stage a bid for the 2012 Olympic Games, using the complex as the centrepiece of the bid. Roma supporters were involved in some shocking violence towards the end of the turbulent 2000/01 season – notwithstanding the farcical scenes on the final matchday, when fans literally stripped the shirts off the players’ backs, the penultimate matchday saw widespread fighting after their match at Napoli. Our man Fabrizio reports that TV pictures were shown of Napoli fans attacking some ambulancemen and their vehicle because they believed a Roma supporter was inside! On a happier note, little Chievo, a suburb of Verona with 3,000 inhabitants, have made it into Serie A for this season and they will continue to share the Stadio Bentegodi. In Germany, the big news has been the opening of the Arena-Auf-Schalke in Gelsenkirchen, to which we are happy to ascribe the honour of “Europe’s Most Advanced Large Stadium”. We have been following the building of Schalke 04’s new ground almost from the start, and it finally opened over the nights of August 13 and 14 with a Lionel Ritchie Concert and a mini-tournament involving Schalke, Nuremburg and Dortmund. Schalke’s first Bundesliga match was due to be against Bayer Leverkusen on August 18, and the club had to stop season ticket sales at 41,000 in order to give people a chance to buy tickets on a game-by-game basis. The stadium (top right) is essentially a scaled-up version of the Gelredome in Arnhem, Holland, with a retractable pitch as well as roof, but Schalke’s arena will hold 62,000 for domestic games (54,000 in its all-seater state). Built at a cost of around £130m, you might expect that their former home, the Parkstadion, would be redeveloped to help pay for the new place, but it will live on as a home for Schalke’s amateur team. The Parkstadion (pictured here by Paul Brown) staged its last Bundesliga match on May 19 in front of a sell-out 65,000 crowd, as Schalke beat Unterhaching 5-3. The ground had only opened in 1973, just in time for Germany’s hosting of the 1974 World Cup, which goes to show how quickly expectations have changed in the arena market, although it could be argued that the Parkstadion was a bit of a dinosaur even for the 1970s. Elsewhere in Germany, the Stadion Nordpark in Moenchengladbach has finally been given the go-ahead by the town council, but the earlier box-shaped stadium design has been vetoed in favour of a more conventional 56,000-capacity Stuttgart-esque model. Work has also begun on a brand new 30,000-capacity stadium for VfL Wolfsburg that is due for completion this time next year. In Switzerland, no sooner had work on the redeveloped St Jakob Stadion in Basle finished than another of the venues from the 1954 World Cup Finals received a visit from a wrecking crew. This time it’s the venue of the final itself which is being reborn, the Wankdorf Stadion in Bern. This tribute to concrete held 55,000 for the 1954 Final, but only 22,200 were there to see the final match on July 7 as Young Boys Bern drew 1-1 with Lugano. Aside from a colossal cantilever stand, the stadium was noted for having concrete floodlight pylons, one of which is shown here just after being felled. Young Boys will decamp to the 11,500-capacity Stadion Neufeld (which possesses a large English-style pitched roof stand) for three years whilst the New Wankdorf (pictured left) is built at a cost of £104m. 35,000 covered seats will be provided and the stadium will form a key part of the joint Austria-Switzerland bid to host the 2008 European Championships (against stiff competition from potential bidders Scotland, Russia, Greece/Turkey and a combined Scandinavian bid). Aside from Basle and Bern, the Swiss could put forward a planned new stadium in Geneva and a remodelled Stadion Hardturm in Zurich. Denmark is a country that we’ve rarely featured on these pages in the past but hopefully that will change thanks to our new correspondent Gerard Kelman. He picked a good time to come on board, as two major Danish stadium projects have recently come to fruition. The largest was the reconstruction of the Brondby Stadium, home of arguably Denmark’s biggest club side, Brondby IF. The old ground was restricted to a capacity of 18,000 for European games, so Brondby bought the stadium from the Copenhagen City Council in 1998 and laid plans to spend £20m turning it into a venue to be proud of. Brondby kept the base of their old, individual stands, and built a new continuous upper tier and cantilever roof round the entire stadium, so there are gaps in the corners of the lower tier. The lower tier behind each goal is terraced, giving a new capacity of 31,748, but the ends will convert to seating when required, giving an all-seated capacity of 27,050. Not unlike a lot of new British grounds, the stadium facade has a rather ‘corporate’ look about it, and the new stadium has up to 1,000 ‘Business Seats’ available. The stadium took just 15 months to complete starting in July 1999 and has won a prestigious Danish building award since opening. The photos are by Gerard Kelman. The other major project was the redevelopment of the Aarhus Stadium, in where else but Aarhus. Set in a natural amphitheatre, just one side of the old stadium, home to top flight club AGF, survived as a continuous two-tier cantilever stand was built round the other three sides following the shape of the running track. Indeed, the rebuilt stadium (pictured below) officially opened on July 7 with an athletics meeting. Serbo-Croat Stadium Race Hots Up Matches between teams from Croatian capital Zagreb and Serbian capital Belgrade were always somewhat keenly contested, but now there’s a race on to see who can develop the best football stadium. At the moment it’s the Maksimir Stadion (above right), home of Dinamo Zagreb, which is winning, but Partizan Belgrade have announced ambitious plans for their JNA Stadion below right). The Maksimir is already far advanced from the photo, with the main stand roof having gone and a second tier added to that side, and a new open double-decker stand at the far end in the picture. Ultimately, the stadium will seat 60,000 under a retractable roof. Partizan’s JNA Stadium opened in 1949 and capacity is currently restricted to 32,000 despite once having held 55,000. Partizan plan to enlarge the current stadium whilst retaining the oval shape and, you’ve guessed it, they want to cover the place with a retractable roof. |