A Look Back on Football Stadiums of the Future

The game of football witnessed tremendous change over the years. Some parts of the game’s evolution were planned, others emerged, and things often did not turn out as everyone expected. Predicting the future is challenging since it requires understanding how coming technological and social changes will intersect. Typically, futurists accurately predict some elements of the future while missing others, so let's look at past predictions regarding future football stadiums.

Predictions of the future often reflect perceived solutions to the shortcomings of the present, and that was the case with early football stadiums. The desired features of new stadiums addressed the unappealing aspects of existing stadiums. The first futuristic football stadium came from the crew that designed Harvard Stadium, the first permanent collegiate stadium. It addressed the need for ongoing maintenance of wood bleachers and the fact that they periodically collapsed or burned to the ground.

Other concrete and steel stadiums followed, trying to meet the competing demands of having enough capacity to handle the large crowds attending rivalry games while keeping the seats close to the action. The Yale Bowl was the mistaken model for some new stadiums, but its elliptical shape left only 35 percent of its seats between the goal lines. Bigger alone was not always better since adding rows and deeper bowls placed fans farther from the action. As one columnist commented after 105,000 witnessed the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia's single-tiered Municipal Stadium:

The day is coming when stadiums seating from 150,00 to 200,000 will be devised and erected. Adding that many seats, spreading upwards and outwards, would not be satisfactory now. The farthest seats are too far from the football field today.

So the football stadium of the future will have to be a great double-deck affair similar to Yankee Stadium.

Loyola Stadium at New Orlean is double-decked.

Norris, Bobby, 'In The Press Box,' Macon Telegraph (GA), December 18, 1936.

Some double-tiered stadiums, like Loyola’s, were rather simple and kept spectators close to the action. (1931 Loyola of New Orleans yearbook)