Foreign Stadiums

After discussing the topic of stadiums and how they are financed today in class, I thought I would take a look at some foreign stadiums and see how they match up on the check list of the three recent trends (luxury boxes, naming rights, PSL’s). There are thousands of stadiums, so I tried to find some of the biggest, mainly in Europe.

The biggest is Camp Nou, where Spanish club Barcelona plays there home matches. It has 98,800 seats. It was originally built in the 50’s, so it is definitely lacking in some of the modern amenities. Although, there were luxury boxes added in the 80’s. I could not find any information about PSL’s in the stadium, but I doubt that it has any.

Stadio San Siro in Milan, Italy holds 85,700. I didn’t find anything about luxury boxes, but it does mention that it has 5,200 “VIP seats” and 200 “press seats.”

Stade de France was built for the 1998 World Cup in France. It holds 80,000 and has “a roof over all their heads.” This being a fairly recent stadium, they have 162 VIP boxes and 6000 VIP seats. That seems comparable to some of the American stadiums.

One of the most famous stadiums is Old Trafford, where famed Manchester United plays. It lists a capacity of 76,000 and was originally built in 1909. During WWII, it was bombed and basically the whole stadium was rebuilt. From what I found it has less than 100 boxes in the stadium.

One other interesting stadium is the Maracana stadium, in Rio de Janeiro. This stadium holds the record for attendance with 216,000 fans during the 1950 World Cup final between Brazil and Uruguay.

It appears that many of the trends in the US stadiums are not consistent with the stadiums overseas. Not all have luxury boxes; I found none that had sold their naming rights; and found nothing about PSL’s. This is due in part to the fact that most foreign stadiums are older, and have not been updated as often and recent as the stadiums in the US.