Who wouldn’t want to be the one who brings back the Hampden ROAR?
BEING able to claim that you brought back the Hampden Roar would be a neat entry on any CV. While figures from across Scottish football debate the merits of the national stadium being saved, another select group of people are already itching to make the famous old ground fit for the 21st century.
The £5million deal struck by the SFA to buy Hampden from Queen’s Park has opened the door to its potential future redevelopment.
Chief executive Ian Maxwell has pledged to explore the ‘Stuttgart model’ of bringing the two end stands closer to the pitch, turning the current shallow bowl into something altogether more engrossing and noise-containing. Other, less drastic, alterations could take place before Euro 2020 matches roll into town.
For the men and women who make their living from creating state-of-the-art stadia, Tuesday’s announcement was one to quicken the pulse. While love for an out-of-date Hampden may now be limited among the Tartan Army, its allure for architects and designers remains immense.
They see a canvas steeped in history upon which their vision could be painted.
The obvious impediment is money. Can the desire to apply more than cosmetic touches to the Old Lady of Mount Florida really be backed by the tens of millions it would require?
That is for Maxwell and his colleagues to ponder.
Support from Lord Willie Haughey and Sir Tom Hunter, who each stumped up £1.25m to prevent a move to Murrayfield, at least adds some serious business acumen to those considerations.
Coming up with a workable plan would, in truth, also right some historic wrongs.
The botched redevelopment in the 1990s drew plentiful money from the public purse, yet left a ground that always felt half-finished. For fans behind each goal, it can feel as if you are watching from a different postcode.
Correcting those faults and properly reconnecting the stadium to the passion of those who pay for entry would be an obvious aim of any future revamp.
With credits including Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium, Bayern Munich’s Allianz Arena and Beijing’s Bird’s Nest, London-based architect J Parrish has gained international recognition for his work on sports venues.
The chance to recreate Hampden Park would, he insists, be every bit as attractive as those projects and instantly draw interest from across the world.
‘It is one of the great venues and how could one not be excited by it?’ Parrish told Sportsmail.
‘I think it would be a fantastic opportunity for whoever might end up doing it. ‘There would be a queue. ‘I would love to include myself in that. I have done something like 25 major projects including Olympic stadiums and World Cup ones. But Hampden Park is just one of those iconic venues.
‘In terms of working in the UK, the Millennium Stadium was a fantastic thing for me to be involved in. I’m half-Welsh and the Welsh take such pride in it. I can still remember taking my seat there for the opening game.
‘The key is in the brief. They vary and I think the shortest one I ever saw was for the Millennium Stadium, which was about half-a-dozen lines — one of which said: “Recreate the atmosphere of Cardiff Arms Park”.
‘I can’t imagine why one wouldn’t put the Hampden atmosphere right at the top of any brief from the SFA.
‘First of all, you want to be able to see everything. Then you want the atmosphere. The two are interlinked. For me, the driving aspiration is always to get the best atmosphere, something you cannot get from watching on television.’
Parrish feels the potential at Hampden is clear. Providing, of course, that enough money could somehow be sourced.
‘Changing an existing stadium is a really interesting challenge,’ he added. ‘You can do just about anything but the question is which gives the best value.
‘Leaving aside the financing, you think: “Is this ground appropriate? Does it have a long life ahead of it?” If it doesn’t, you are pouring good money away.
‘But I don’t think that is the case at Hampden. If you look at the site, there is quite a lot of room around it. You want a degree of flexibility built into these venues, so that you are not hemmed in if there is a future demand for more capacity.
‘Transport is the other thing you look at. I presume it is going to be possible to make sure the transport still works tolerably well even with an increased capacity.
‘The next area is how the pitch works. You are a long way north.
‘The higher you make the roof and the smaller you make the opening, the more problems you get for your grass. But that box can be ticked.
‘Five years after a project is completed, people don’t think about the process. They think about the experience they have inside the stadium. That is always the acid test.’ In Stuttgart, they would agree. Seven years on from the £56.5m, two-year redevelopment of the 60,000-capacity Mercedes-Benz Arena, there seems almost universal agreement that it was worth both the time and the money. That latter aspect was partly funded by the sale of naming rights. It was architect
Eberhard Becker who produced the design that has intrigued Maxwell.
And he would be more than happy to share his knowledge with the SFA.
‘Would I have any advice for them? The first thing is to give us the job! No, that was a joke,’ Becker told Sportsmail.
‘It is very important that they know what they really want. What the goal is. It is also important that they have enough time to plan everything and to make a very clear and serious project.
‘For us, the main requirement was to remove the athletics track and create a real football stadium.
‘The supporters were too far away from the pitch, in the curves they were a minimum of 40 metres.
‘The biggest challenge was to do all this while Stuttgart were still playing matches there every second week. We had to do it in several steps and also guarantee the safety of all the fans who were attending the matches.
‘If that wasn’t the case at Hampden then it could be easier to do. The first step we took was to lower the pitch down by about 1.5m, which allowed us to put some new rows in the main stand and the one opposite that were closer to the pitch.
‘We did that in the summer. Then we changed the stand at one end of the stadium during one season. The following season we did the opposite end.
‘We had to guarantee that the stadium could continue to function on three sides.
‘Everyone is very satisfied with the outcome. For us, it was a really interesting project.
‘The fans were involved in it and we were able to fulfil their wishes. We calculated all the costs beforehand and it ended with the numbers we had predicted.’
No-one disputes that huge financial hurdles stand between Hampden and a similar outcome. But there is no shortage of inspiration out there as Scottish football seeks a home to take pride in.