Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The writer is the FT\u2019s architecture and design criticIt\u2019s an oddity that the Premier League is the most successful football league in the world but the best club football stadiums are all, pretty much, outside the UK.\u00a0Barcelona\u2019s Camp Nou, Milan\u2019s San Siro or the vast Maracan\u00e3 in Rio are all up there. Britain\u2019s stadiums seem to lack that kind of ambition.\u00a0\u00a0Will Sir Norman Foster\u2019s plan for a \u00a32bn, 100,000 capacity stadium for Manchester United beside their existing Old Trafford ground challenge that anomaly?\u00a0Britain\u2019s most successful architect is, after all, a Mancunian \u2014 his father worked at a factory almost next door in Trafford Park.\u00a0And Foster was responsible for London\u2019s widely acclaimed Wembley Stadium.\u00a0But there is something of the circus tent in this design that looks a little unsettling; something impermanent and flimsy. The three masts that support the roof are meant to evoke the trident of the Red Devil, the club\u2019s logo, but the gossamer tensile fabric covering with its pinkish glow looks a little like an overstretched strawberry condom.\u00a0But then this is the most efficient way of covering a large site, an architecture pioneered by German engineer Frei Otto in 1972 at his wonderful Munich Olympic Stadium.\u00a0In a gesture towards Manchester\u2019s persistent drizzle, the intent is to create a space Foster describes as \u201ctwice the size of Trafalgar Square\u201d (he also redesigned Trafalgar Square).Historically, the English football ground was an intensely urban form, a building intimately embedded in the industrial and residential infrastructure of its working-class fans.\u00a0Much of the life of match day was drawn from the city around it \u2014 the streets, pubs and caffs that filled up with fans for a few hours each Saturday.\u00a0Foster\u2019s design attempts to swallow the whole experience under one roof, creating an environment that looks a little retro-sci-fi, like something from a planet with no atmosphere.\u00a0 There are benefits to scale though. Apparently, those triple masts (the \u201cEiffel Tower of the North\u201d) will be visible not only from the Peak District but from Liverpool, 31 miles away, not to mention the City of Manchester Stadium, the Etihad, a lot closer.\u00a0\u00a0That the new stadium is being designed next to the old Old Trafford means no match revenue will be lost in switching stadiums (the old ground will be demolished) and, critically, the genius loci will be maintained, something so pivotal in football.\u00a0The biggest question perhaps is, who is it for? Minority shareholder Sir Jim Ratcliffe might be a billionaire but the club is \u00a31bn in debt and there is little information about how the new stadium will be funded.\u00a0Alongside the almost sacred importance of location in British football is a long-standing uneasiness about the monetisation of the game.\u00a0Unlike in Spain or Germany, where some clubs are run on a not-for-profit basis and with fans voting on big decisions, the Premier League is run on an oligarch model.\u00a0Loyalty is taken for granted and fans are screwed from ticket prices to shirts and drinks.\u00a0Football has become more about ownership than a sense of belonging. Manchester witnessed the birth of the industrial revolution and modern football. Both were based on the exploitation of the working classes.\u00a0This massive soccer mall in which the stadium is the locus of a landscape of consumption makes that relationship a little clearer.\u00a0It is a great metropolis that was built around mills and factories.\u00a0The renderings show a stadium surrounded by dense development, an illustration of football as the city\u2019s key global industry.\u00a0Friedrich Engels, who worked in his father\u2019s Manchester mills in the 1840s, related a story about walking through the city with a \u201cbourgeois\u201d. Engels \u201cspoke to him of the bad, unwholesome method of building, the frightful conditions of the working people\u2019s quarters\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009The man listened quietly and said, \u2018And yet there is a great deal of money made here\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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