Football Stadia as Junkspace: Reflections on Tottenham’s New Stadium
It might have been almost a year late in being opened, and cost far more than initially projected, but Tottenham’s re-developed stadium has been applauded by many for its outwardly impressive design and engineering. Yet beyond its physical presence lies an experience of the stadium that tells another story. For all the glass, steel and concrete the stadium symbolises the consumerist and corporate culture that has engulfed professional football (soccer), especially the English Premier League. The new stadium, like many modern shopping malls, is an event space; a flexible, adaptable and multi-purpose place of leisure designed to extract money from the people who temporarily inhabit its confines. It is a type of junkspace, a term first used by Rem Koolhaas in his critique of contemporary architecture.
Junkspace: What Modernisation Leaves Behind
In his seminal essay Koolhaas uses the term junkspace to convey his argument that architecture ‘disappeared’ in the twentieth century. Instead of creating inspiring and socially meaningful places architectural practice is now confined to producing buildings constructed from increasingly standardised components, using common methods and generic designs. There can be a blandness in the urban landscape and even buildings that look spectacular merely achieve this state, as Koolhaas might argue, by adorning the structure with superficial ornate decoration, a kind of modern stucco applied as an additive layer.
The presence of junkspace has been accelerated by the hegemony of neoliberalism and free market economics. More of the built environment around us is dedicated to facilitating the exchange of goods and services, encouraging consumption and underpinning the accumulation of profit and capital. If space junk, as Koolhaus argues, is what mankind leaves behind in space, then junkspace is what modernisation and neoliberalism leaves behind on earth. Like junk mail junkspace is worthless beyond what it is trying to sell us.
Newly built football stadiums reflect this general trend and maximising commercial opportunities is no longer some kind of optional consideration in their development. As UEFA, Europe’s governing body of football state in their guide to quality stadia, exploiting commercial potential it is a pre-requisite aspect of the design process for new stadiums.
The details of Tottenham’s new stadium help to bear this out. Despite the numerous locally owned bars, cafes and restaurants present within the immediate vicinity there are over 60 food and drink outlets present inside the stadium, ranging from fine dining to the more familiar fare of fast food. The stadium has its own on-site brewery pumping alcohol to the bars located on every level, one of which — the Goal Line Bar — is the longest in Europe. The ‘retail space’ is also the biggest of its kind in Europe, the stadium has a café open daily and accessible directly from Tottenham High Road, and parts of the stadium can be hired to host a range of events, each one tailored to the clients request. The stadium will also host concerts and other sports events and is the first soccer stadium in the world purposely designed to provide dedicated facilities for American Football. The stadium opens more than 2 hours before kick-off and the ’Pie and Pint for £5’ promotion in the first hour of opening is an unadulterated attempt to attract people into the stadium.
The exterior of the stadium resembles something like an imagined starship that has landed in North London. The presence of the shimmering glass and steel stands in marked contrast to the rest of the local environment. But beneath this layer of outward decoration lies an interior that disorientates the senses — it isn’t what I expect a football stadium to be like. From the open atrium of the South Stand to the presence of bars situated in the middle of a concourse, I become dislocated from my established idea of a football stadium. Standing alongside The White Hart or The Distillery bars looking through the glass façade of the stadium towards the City of London makes me feel like I could be standing in just another bar in North London. Ed Soja’s concepts come to mind and help to capture this feeling of disorientation. My lived experience of this stadium is grounded in the confusing and unfamiliar relationship between the actual physical form of the space and my cognitive expectation of what this space should be like — the two don’t align in a comfortable way. This, I suspect, is the aim of the design, to disorientate you from your expected idea of a football stadium, to make the stadium not a stadium and create a different type of experience. The transformative effect which the stadium seems to achieve is turning the spectator from an indivisible part of a collective body of fans into the individual consumer of an entertainment show. Perhaps this is part of the reason why many of Tottenham’s supporters complain that the stadium lack’s atmosphere, there is little sense of community just individuals consuming the entertainment on offer. It is arguably one of the effects of junkspace, to reduce the noise of the crowd to silence.
Capitalist Realism: There is no alternative
The commercialisation and incorporation of professional football into the tentacles of neoliberal capitalism over the past thirty years is well documented. Modern stadia are just another facet of this process. Yet it is the design of Tottenham’s new stadium, and the extent to which it is constructed to treat those attending games as consumers, that provokes an even further realisation of what the game has become. It is also perhaps a physical reminder of Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism, that at present we cannot even imagine an alternative to the power and pervasiveness of neoliberalism. As stadiums inevitably become more digitally interactive and incorporated into surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019), where individual behaviours are not just predicted but manipulated, then even the matchday experience will be further removed as an escape from this reality.
References
Ambrose, D. (ed). (2018) K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004–2016). Repeater Books, London.
Koolhaas, R. (2001) Junkspace. https://www.readingdesign.org/junkspace
Soja, E. (1996) Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places. Wiley-Blackwell, London.
UEFA Guide to Quality Stadiums https://www.uefa.com/MultimediaFiles/Download/EuroExperience/competitions/General/01/74/38/69/1743869_DOWNLOAD.pdf
Zuboff, S. (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Profile Books, London.
