Manchester United builds a castle in the sky

This week, Manchester United announced its plans to build a brand new 100,000-seater stadium, just round the corner from its current home, Old Trafford, which it hopes to complete by 2030. Your roving correspondent is always happy to be proven wrong, but that five-year deadline feels unlikely. Judging by the architectural renders from Foster + Partners, the stadium looks enormously complex and, frankly, unfeasible in its current iteration: above the actual stadium, three gargantuan pylons stretch high into the sky – apparently these will be visible from 25 miles away – and the whole thing seems to be clad in some kind of translucent webbing, making it look like an intergalactic version of the O2 in Greenwich. It will be, claims Norman Foster, ‘a mixed-use mini city’ and ‘arguably the largest public space in the world’.

The word ‘arguably’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Residents of countries such as Norway and Sweden, in which all uncultivated land is considered fair game for public use, might have something to say about Foster’s claim, for a start. But the most amusing thing about this announcement of one of the most ambitious and expensive footballing projects ever put forward is that it has come at a point when Manchester United is doing terribly on the pitch, giving the whole thing the air of a recently divorced dad buying himself a Porsche 911. Languishing down in 14th place in the Premier League (their previous lowest finish in the competition was 7th), the team is perilously close to the relegation zone and is generally considered to be one of the worst-run football clubs in the world, with too much money and not enough sense. As one witty social-media user pointed out, the most unrealistic detail in one of the architectural renders is the scoreboard, which shows the home side winning 3-0. Or to put this in museum terms, imagine if the National Gallery announced a multi-billion pound expansion project of its galleries in the same week that its senior management had somehow managed to misplace half the artworks in its collection.

Architectural render of the inside of the proposed Manchester United stadium, with a capacity of 100,000. © Foster + Partners

Manchester United is not the only team to be fretting over its image. The Athletic reported this week that Chelsea FC is prioritising the use of its new branding, CFC LDN, since it fears that some people ‘may not know where Chelsea actually is’. Many teams, in fact, don’t even have their place names in them – imagine asking an American where they think Port Vale FC plays (answer: Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent); sports teams in the United States helpfully all seem to have places in their names, along with little monikers such as Chiefs and Warriors. So, too, do many museums: no one could be in any doubt where the Museum of London is situated, despite its best efforts to manipulate its own image recently by changing its name to the much sleeker London Museum.

But perhaps the most bizarre institutional identity crisis has come courtesy of Tottenham Hotspur, who, in a recently leaked email, has been seen asking broadcasters to stop referring to the club as ‘Tottenham’, preferring either the full name ‘Tottenham Hotspur’ or just ‘Spurs’. (Perhaps Spurs’ recent history might provide a warning shot to Manchester United fans: since the unveiling in 2019 of Spurs’ spanking-new 63,000-capacity stadium – which does host football matches when it’s not being used for NFL games or Beyoncé concerts – the team has been noticeably poor on the pitch.) The given reason is that it wants to distinguish Tottenham as an area of London from the club itself. But Rakewell wonders if something else is at play. Seeing as Spurs’ last trophy came in 2008 and the team has bee playing so badly as to have spawned a new adjective, ‘Spursy’, which means a team with a seemingly superhuman ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and to whom destiny inflicts the cruellest and funniest twists of fate, perhaps the reason club executives want to avoid being called Tottenham is that they don’t want people to be able to find their way to Spurs matches in the first place.

Fans flock to a Premier League match at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in March 2025. Photo: Catherine Ivill/AMA via Getty Images