Stadium Reviews

We break our scores down as follows.

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Atmosphere & Experience

Arguably the most critical criterion, but also the hardest to quantify. How does one compare the adrenaline-fuelled baying of 60,000+ fans watching the Calcutta Cup with the altogether more sedate pleasures of the Lord’s hum at a Test match? Can 15 Nepal fans playing traditional instruments on the sidelines of a club cricket ground outside Dundee rival the energy of a giant marching band at a college football game? We’ve taken it upon ourselves to try to answer those questions and to provide you with honest assessments of which venues will provide you with once-in-a-lifetime experiences big and small, and which will leave you feeling flat.

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What good looks like: Noise, energy, passion. Investment and emotion from fans. The sense of sharing a collective experience that can never be recreated with a crowd of strangers and friends.

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What bad looks like: Disengaged spectators, lacking in enthusiasm or interest in events on the field. The sound of bat or boot hitting ball echoing around empty stands. The sense that many of those who have gathered would rather by anywhere else.

 

Seats

This one is much simpler. You want to have a great view and be relatively comfortable at a price point that doesn’t require you to remortgage your house. You accept that there is a fairly low ceiling on comfort when it comes to a folding plastic chair, but you’d like it to be spaced far enough apart from the surrounding seats that you don’t run the risk of merging with those around you into some hideous, mutant organism.

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What good looks like: Having an unrestricted view of the whole field of play in a seat designed to accommodate a modern adult human at a reasonable price.

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What bad looks like: Paying through the nose to be crammed into the seat from an infant’s highchair and discovering that there’s a huge pillar directly in front of you.

 

Catering

You need food and drink to survive, and you’d like them to taste good and not cost the earth. You’d also like them to adhere to some basic safety and hygiene standards. Ideally, you don’t want to wait so long to get your hands on them that you end up missing a significant chunk of the entertainment you’ve paid to see. If you’re really pushing it, you want there to be a decent selection of options, some of which might just reflect the cuisine of wherever you are. Honestly, you’re not asking for much.

 

What good looks like: A short wait for something delicious and affordable produced by a local food business that you’re not going to find in any other venue. A reasonable line for the bar, at the end of which you discover a good range of drinks, including some local beers.

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What bad looks like: A never-ending line of hungry, dissatisfied customers at the end of which half-cooked gruel is served – and probably spat in – by surly teenagers. Discovering that the beer sponsor for the event, the maker of some generic 3% pish, has insisted that only its product can be served.

 

Facilities

You’ve had a few pints and half-time is only so long. You don’t want to wait for ages, and you don’t want to dry heave at the smell when you get in there. Ideally, you want to be out in time to get another pint in before the second half kicks off. Again, you’re really not asking for much.

 

What good looks like: Not waiting long, or not having to wait at all, for toilet facilities that have been maintained to a standard that is at least slightly better than what you would expect in a gulag. Being able to get out and get to the bar with enough time that you don’t miss any of the on-field action.

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What bad looks like: Waiting a long time in a disorganised mass of humanity for toilet facilities that have been maintained to a standard that is significantly worse than what you would expect in a gulag. Hearing the crowd cheer as your team scores multiple times in the second half while you’re worrying that your bladder is going to explode.

 

Getting There

In an ideal world, it would be walkable from key neighbourhoods in town. In an acceptable world, you’d squeeze onto a subway, train, tram, or bus with throngs of other fans eagerly anticipating the match. In the real world, you’ll likely be waiting ages for a rickety old train with no air conditioning, crammed full of so many people that there’s a real risk of oxygen deprivation, that drops you off at the very edge of town with another 30 minutes to walk to get to the stadium.

 

What good looks like: A pleasant walk from wherever you’re likely to be hanging out pre-match or a short ride on frequent, modern public transport to a dedicated stop for the venue.

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What bad looks like: Limited, infrequent, and unreliable public transport options that will take you, in extremely cramped conditions, only partway to a venue built on the very edge of the municipal area.

 

Getting Away

You’ll accept that, in the vast majority of cases, getting away is going to be worse than getting there. It’s a no-brainer. People turn up in waves from hours before the start of play to mere minutes before kick-off, but everyone needs to leave at the final whistle. What you’d really like is to be able to walk back to where you came from, or to your home or hotel. You’re less happy to be crammed onto public transport, but you can deal with it if you don’t have to wait too long and it can be relied upon to get you to wherever you need to go. Your blood pressure is spiking if you’re left stranded in car park on the very edge of town with no available means to get home.

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What good looks like: Being able to walk home, or, failing that, having multiple transport options to get back with dedicated stops for the stadium and effective crowd management.

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What bad looks like: Standing at the back of a line that stretches over the horizon knowing that the train comes but once an hour and consists of only three carriages, and it’s raining.

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Weekend Potential

This is essentially a measure of two factors: 1) is watching a match at the stadium in question something worth making the centrepiece of a weekend away to the city in which it is located; and 2) is the city or town the stadium calls home somewhere with enough to see, do, and eat to make it a worthwhile destination for an away trip.

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What good looks like: A raucous atmosphere in a brilliant stadium situated in a travel bucket list destination that you’ll want to keep coming back to whenever your team plays there.

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What bad looks like: A flat, hopeless atmosphere in a mouldering old stadium situated right on the very edge of a soulless, joyless town that takes hours to get to.