What was the brief given?
“The brief to Norman Foster here was to build the world's most iconic football stadium. It had to be a stadium which was recognisable around the world. If you think today that the world's built a lot of new stadiums, hasn't it? You know, China for the Olympic Games and the Middle East and America, they've all built new stadiums and they're all fancy and quite impressive in their own right, but they all sort of merge a bit and you can't remember one from the other. They all look fancy. They're all circular or oval or whatever. But we said to Norman that we would like a stadium where when anybody in the world sees that stadium, they'll know it's Manchester United, that it's [unique], you know.
“The second part of the request was that it had to have a really intense atmosphere, and that the people in the stadium would be as close to the pitch as we possibly could achieve. So that means you've got relatively steep sides rather than flat sides. And we wanted an intense atmosphere because, at the end of the day, I think that's worth points in the league because the more intimidating it is from the point of view of just seeing this mass of people and the sound, because it's designed acoustically to reverberate, the better that is for the club.
“Because, at the end of the day, this is the club's ground. So we want to be winning matches at home and we want it to be a sort of fearsome atmosphere when the competing teams come in, so it really was about the best stadium in the world, the best stadium in Europe, better than the Bernabeu and the Nou Camp, which are both new and both really impressive, biggest in the world, intimidating. And, you know, everybody in the world would recognise it.”
In terms of atmosphere, the sceptics towards a new-build stadium will say that other clubs have moved into grounds and seen some of that rawness and some of that soul dissipate a little. So how has this project made sure that atmosphere is right at the heart of it?
“Because that's the sort of, in a sense, the number one objective in designing this ground. I've had a long conversation here with people about it's all about the atmosphere that we can generate in the stadium, the noise, the intimidation. You know, that rawness that you get in a great stadium and there’s absolutely no reason, in my view, why we can't achieve that. If you look at West Ham, they play in a stadium where you've got a running track around the edge of the pitch, so you know, they’re 20 metres from the edge of the pitch.
“We want the fans to be, you know, five metres from the edge of the pitch. And then we want, within obviously the legal constraints of design, we want a stadium that's relatively vertical and people are close in on the pitch. And I think, yeah, we will replicate the atmosphere that we've got at Old Trafford today. We will.”