City of Manchester Stadium, February 24th 2010

Photo Credit: notFlunky on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool

Rungrado May Day Stadium in Pyongyang, originally built for the 1989 World Festival of Youth and Students, has a capacity of 150,000, making it the largest Association Football stadium in the world.

Photo credit: shanster1 on Flickr, via the Pitch Invasion Photo Pool.

And of course, as we noted here recently, The Shrimps have a rather new striking logo to plaster all over their new digs. The stadium name was announced this month, and is that of the company constructing it, Globe Construction, in a five-year sponsorship deal.

The four-sided stadium will include a main stand on the south side for 2,173 seated spectators; a west-sided “home” stand for 2,234 fans with bar and catering facilities; an “away” stand on the east-side for 1,389 standing fans; and an uncovered terrace on the north end for 606 standing supporters, for a total stadium capacity of around 6,000.

The entire development is coming at a cost of £12m, and includes an artificial turf training field and community facilities for small-sided games, hockey and netball.

Football field, training facilities, five-a-side, netball and hockey facilities.

Construction of the Globe Arena began in last May, and though some of the more ambitious plans for the stadium (including office space) have been postponed due to financial belt-tightening on the project, it’s still due to open this autumn.

Let’s look at the progress of the entire project as of last month, courtesy of campdavemorecambe on Flickr.

Globe Arena, progress of construction, January 2010.

“We are excited to make this announcement,” said Atlanta Beat General Manager Shawn McGee.  “The opening of the world’s first women’s soccer-specific stadium of this magnitude means a great deal to both soccer in the Southeast and to women’s sports on a national scale.”

It’s not the first stadium to be used primarily for women’s soccer (Florida State University’s Seminole Soccer Complex’s sole tenants are its women’s team; anyone know of others?), but this is still quite a special moment for fans of professional women’s soccer. It looks like it will be a fantastic venue for WPS, pretty much the perfect size for the league at this point. Here’s hoping it’s the first of many.

The one major downside to the stadium from a soccer perspective? Artificial turf.

Let us take a look at the original renderings and the current progress for the 45,000 seater stadium.

Design Concept // By French architects, Jean Marie Massaud & Daniel Pouzet, Pouzet Massaud Studio

Progress // December and January 2009

The club were elected to the Football League in 1921, and money was raised to add concrete terracing, a tea room and a press box to the stadium.  A crowd of 10,000 showed up to their inaugural Football League match.

Ashington finished bottom of the Football League in 1929 in the midst of a miners strike in Ashington, and lost their place in the league, never to return. They continued to play non-league football, with redevelopment of Portland Park into an oval shape to allow greyhound racing to pay the bills. One FA Cup run did see a record crowd of over 13,000 turn out in 1951.

Development plans forced Ashington out of their historic stadium in 2008, the last game at Portland Park in February of that year attracting a crowd of almost 2,000, and the ground was recently demolished. The capsule buried by fans will be dug up again one hundred years from now. With permission from stephen.lewins, below are some final shots of Portland Park in its derelict state last year.

The $320m construction project, designed by architects Rhode, Kellermann and Wawrowsky, is well underway.

After the Euros, the stadium will be used by Lechia Gdańsk, who currently play in the 12,000 capacity Stadion Lechii, raising some questions about just how appropriate a 40,000+ facility will be for a team that has yo-yoed up and down from the first to the second division over the years.

Here are the pretty spectacular renderings of the new stadium:

And one of those ever lovely promotional videos:

As of December 2009, construction was proceeding on schedule.

The Football Association announced today it had further narrowed its potential World Cup venue locations in England to 17 stadiums in 12 cities. The familiar names were there — Old Trafford, Wembley, etc — but one that will certainly have surprised observers at home and abroad was that of Home Park, Plymouth.

This is not the Theatre of Dreams: it’s the “Theatre of Greens”, home of Plymouth Argyle in the Championship (one of only two English teams to play in green). Home Park dates back to 1893, and though it’s been renovated since, isn’t exactly up to FIFA World Cup standards at present, holding around 20,000 after considerable renovation in the past decade.

But Plymouth’s presentation to England’s World Cup Bid panel included ambitious plans to upgrade the stadium to a 46,000 “Wembley of the West”. The club is already committed to a £20 million expansion of the stadium to hold 27,000 regardless of the bid, with plans to increase the capacity to 46,000 should the bid be successful at a cost of a further £30 million.

The stadium design is by Populous, one of the world’s leading stadia-design firms, also responsible for Wembley Stadium. Of particular interest was that a representative of American firm AEG, who have built and operated MLS stadia for a few years now, joined the Plymouth delegation’s presentation to the panel, with AEG slated to operate the stadium.

MLS fans will not be surprised to learn that AEG’s interest in Home Park is in more than the sport of soccer, with rugby and other entertainment events also planned for the venue. Plymouth impressed this on the World Cup panel as evidence the giant stadium would not end up empty besides any World Cup games it hosted.

“I think they got the impact of the design of the stadium, and most importantly they got the point that the stadium is about multi-sport and entertainment use after the World Cup. It’s not just about Argyle’s 23 home games a season,” Plymouth’s executive director Keith Todd told the Plymouth Herald.

A curious wrinkle is that AEG’s billionaire owner and long-time major backer of MLS, Phil Anschutz, sits on the USA Bid Committee competing with England to win the right to host the World Cup. I guess it helps to have more than one basket to put your eggs in, doesn’t it?

The Olympic National Stadium in Kiev has a long history, first opening in 1923 as “Red Stadium” (you can guess why), and then going through further name changes that reflected the political situation in Ukraine: Stalin Respublikanskiy Stadium (1941-1953), Khrushchev Respublikanskiy Stadium (1953-1966), Kiev Central Stadium (1963-1978), Respublikanskiy Stadium (1978-1996) and finally NSC Olimpiysky (1996-).

The first major stadium renovation was finished in 1941, but on the day of the opening ceremony, the Nazi luftwaffe bombed the stadium.

The latest reconstruction, an almost complete overhaul of the stadium’s structure and design, has been through some changes itself alread. This was the original winning bid’s design, by Taiwanese firm Archasia Design Group:

But in the summer of last year, slow progress led to Ukraine dropping Archasia from the project. Demolition, though, continued:

Confusion reigned for some months over the details of the design selected in place. Finally, official renderings came out of a more modest overhaul:

One year of construction has taken place, and the stadium currently looks like this:

Here’s one big problem the US and England don’t face with their World Cup bids: conflict with planned use of stadia by Aussie Rules Football and rugby league teams. The issue has caused a huge stir in Australia this week, with Football Federation Australia under fire for failing to consult with the governing bodies of the other football codes that share most of Australia’s largest stadiums about potential scheduling conflicts (Melbourne’s “rectangular” stadium currently under construction is so-named for its rarity as a non-oval shaped stadium suited specifically for soccer, though a rugby league team will also play there).

“They certainly have to improve their communication, not just with us but other people involved in and being affected by a World Cup,” Australian Football League (which runs Aussie football) boss Andrew Demetrio said of the FFA to the Roar. “I think a World Cup is a great thing for this country (but) it’s time to get this stuff organised. They really need to be proactive and come up with solutions and start listening to the other codes and other people affected by this, particularly the venues, and not do all the talking.”

Similarly, the National Rugby League’s CEO David Gallop said that “Some of the proposals are not going to be palatable to us and would be very costly to us. We’re not trying to stop the World Cup bid but we are certainly concerned about the impact that it will have on our season, our fans and the financial position of our clubs.”

However, one suspects that the FFA and NRL’s timing of this — just after the recent bidding presentations to FIFA and the 2010 World Cup draw — were designed to maximise publicity and hit the FFA up for compensation for rescheduling, as well as a reflection of concern that a successful World Cup could give soccer the boost it needs to become a leading football code in the country alongside the more popular Aussie Rules and Rugby League.

Consider the rest of Gallop’s comments regarding the possibility of compensation: “It’s not something that’s been discussed thus far but if that was part of the discussions then we’d be interested to hear what they’ve got to say. It’s obviously a big shot in the arm for a competitor and we’re running a business and we have to be mindful of that. Clearly a soccer World Cup is going to be a big shot in the arm for their game, not only in the period that it’s on but in the years that follow.”

In the U.S., the NFL is obviously confident enough that a soccer World Cup using many of its own teams’ venues would merely mean a little more summer revenue for them — no scheduling conflicts there — and isn’t worried about soccer as a competing code. In Australia, it looks like the other footballing codes are concerned enough to risk damaging their country’s World Cup bid.