"color" "infelicities" "potentially lethal albatross"

AI generated shoite

chatgpt write me a ten thousand word article on the perils of replacing cramped old s**thouse stadiums with modernist steel and glass structures based upon dortmunds wetfallen stadium with a single tioered yellow wall and inclube hackneyed references to the s**thouse and pie culture on merseyside and bung is some well known stadium architects and facts about baseball stadiums in the usa and generally b***h about the whole thing.

err oh kaye......

Title: From Brick to Bleak: The Perils of Replacing Shithouse Stadiums with Modernist Steel-and-Glass Monstrosities

Introduction: In Praise of the Cramped and Crumbling

There’s a pungent romance in the fetid corners of old football grounds—the damp concrete under the terraces, the steamed-up windows of the pie kiosk, the rusted railings that have been held together more by rust than steel for generations. But, increasingly, this grime-soaked charm is being lost to the cold sterility of modernist steel-and-glass behemoths, all designed with soulless corporate hospitality suites and Bluetooth-enabled toilets. Welcome to the future of football: a future that forgets the stench of history.

In a rush to emulate the sprawling steel perfection of Borussia Dortmund’s Westfalenstadion and its iconic single-tiered Yellow Wall, clubs across Europe (and even further afield) are bulldozing what made their stadiums real. This is not progress. This is sanitised decay. And we need to talk about it.

I. The Yellow Wall Delusion

Let’s get one thing straight: the Yellow Wall is magnificent. The Südtribüne at the Westfalenstadion is a humming, pulsating example of how standing terraces and atmosphere can coexist with safety regulations. But it is not replicable. Not in the half-hearted, committee-designed, corporate-sanitised way British clubs try to mimic it.

The Yellow Wall grew organically, from a culture and a city that wanted to shout for 90 minutes without being asked to buy a matchday experience package. You can’t bolt on authenticity. It doesn’t come with your new retractable roof or the monorail from the car park. It comes with decades of losing and winning in the rain, 3,000 identical scarves, and a deep sense of shared misery.

Instead, we get sterile tributes. New stands that are tall but hollow, where fans are too busy Instagramming their overpriced craft beer to notice a game’s started. Dortmund’s terrace is a people’s cathedral; most new single-tier ends are airport lounges with a good view of a nil-nil draw.

II. Shithouse Stadiums: A Cultural Necessity

A proper stadium should leak somewhere. It should have corners where the wind howls like a drunken banshee, where the steps are uneven and the signage hasn't been updated since decimalisation. On Merseyside, the s**thouse culture is a badge of honour.

Goodison Park’s wooden seats and obstructed views are not faults—they’re features. Anfield’s low, groaning roof used to amplify crowd noise until it turned into an unholy wall of abuse aimed at some terrified left-back. These are not bugs in the code. They are the soul of the game.

And the pies. Let us talk about the pies.

You don’t get that slow-cooked meat-and-gristle experience in your new titanium-plated stadiums. No. Now it's all quinoa salads and flatbreads. A football pie should scald your mouth and be held in a paper bag that disintegrates under its own grease. That is the Merseyside lunch menu, and it is a sacred thing.

The color of the gravy in those pies? Somewhere between mahogany and road tar. That's when you know it's doing its job.

III. Architects With Too Much Glass and Not Enough Guts

Enter the architects, usually imported from somewhere that thinks a stadium should look like an Apple Store. Populous, HOK, Herzog & de Meuron—talented, yes, but all too fond of sweeping curves, giant atriums, and fan zones with beanbags. Who decided football was meant to be watched from an espresso bar?

When Populous designed Tottenham’s new stadium, they gave it a cheese room. A literal room full of cheese. At a football ground. Can you imagine offering Stilton to a lad queuing in the snow outside Prenton Park? You’d be beaten to death with a programme from 1994.

It’s not that we shouldn’t build new stadiums. It’s that they shouldn’t all look like they’re waiting to be featured in Architectural Digest. The aesthetic of football isn’t smooth, or seamless. It’s rough, chippy, and awkward. Like the game itself, it’s full of infelicities that become cherished quirks over time.

IV. The Baseball Problem: Lessons Not to Learn

Across the Atlantic, Major League Baseball has provided a harrowing glimpse into the future we risk. After the 1960s, MLB teams moved from quirky neighbourhood ballparks like Ebbets Field and Comiskey Park into brutalist concrete bowls designed to look identical from St. Louis to Cincinnati.

What was lost was incalculable. The intimacy, the bad sight lines, the columns that blocked your view—all part of the character. Replaced with 70,000-seat soul vacuums. Only recently have American sports realised their mistake, with teams now trying to rebuild retro-style parks with quirky outfields and asymmetry. It took them fifty years to circle back to the idea that imperfect is perfect.

Football shouldn’t need to repeat that cycle. We already have the imperfect. Let’s bloody keep it.

V. Aesthetics Versus Atmosphere

Too many new stadiums are designed to look good on drone footage. They’re aerial spectacles, not cauldrons. They value symmetry over acoustics, branding over belonging. Inside, you find more escalators than chants, more digital signage than swear words.

There’s a reason old stadiums feel louder: they trap noise like a kettle about to boil. New grounds disperse it, offer it up to the heavens like a corporate prayer. We don't need cathedrals. We need fortresses. These pristine arenas are a potentially lethal albatross, hanging around the neck of clubs that traded heritage for hype.

VI. The Money Trap and the Death of the Terrace

Let’s not pretend it’s not about money. These new stadiums are built for one thing: monetising every square inch of space. Executive boxes, premium seating, bars with club-branded cocktails—it’s all part of the creeping gentrification of football.

Terraces, once the great equaliser of the working-class fan, are now replaced with padded seating that costs more than a week’s wages. We’ve lost not just architecture, but access. The soul has been sold for a naming rights deal and the right kind of Instagram audience.

VII. What We Should Save (and How We Might)

Not every stadium can be saved. But some should be preserved like archaeological treasures. Renovate, sure. Add toilets that flush and floodlights that don’t short out in the rain. But don’t demolish. Don’t erase.

New stadiums must be built with memory, not marketing in mind. Retain the odd angles, the cramped stairwells, the sudden expanse of pitch as you emerge from a tunnel like you’ve stumbled into a Roman amphitheatre.

Build walls that hold sound. Seats that creak. Roofs that rattle.

Conclusion: In Defence of the Rusted, Leaky, and Loud

We will miss these s**thouse stadiums when they’re gone. When every matchday smells like air freshener and the roar sounds like piped-in audio, we will long for the days of pigeon-infested rafters and half-time pies served at boiling-point.

The future doesn’t have to be antiseptic. We can build new grounds that embrace the noise, the chaos, and the dysfunction. But only if we stop worshipping glass and start remembering what it was like to watch a foggy lower-league game next to a bloke who’s been moaning about the left-back since 1983.

Give us back our s**thouses. And throw in a scalding pie while you're at it.

Posted By: Tombs on April 29th 2025 at 12:49:24

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