The retro way to a bright future

We watched the week's football happenings in a bar in downtown Chicago, a surreal and frustrating experience for a hack whose Pavlovian response to the final whistle in any Irish match is to rush off and attempt to extract banal quotes from the participants. Instead we just burped out into the afternoon sunshine and wondered if we would ever make a real difference to society again.

Wednesday afternoon was quiet in the Fado Bar, and until midway through the first half the Yugoslavs upstairs for the football matinee outnumbered us ruddy-faced Micks, so we sat quiet and tried to look harmless.

The pictures bouncing through from Lansdowne Road brought on a little wave of homesickness. And a little pride. In America, the current craze in stadium building is for retro-designed creations which recall the spirit of the Twenties, Thirties, Forties or even Fifties. Any age before our own.

And when it comes to retro, well, nowhere does retro better than Lansdowne Road; it's so thoroughly retro it doesn't even have the modern stadium facilities inside its cute shell.

Full-time came around and the Yugoslavs filed out. Lansdowne Road was all but empty by then, which reminded us to inquire why the Havelock Square end had been empty for the whole match. Ironically. the terrace was covered instead by a large advertisement for The Arena, or No Income Park as it will be known.

Now I'm no PR guy, but even I could see that nothing suggests the pressing need for a new, bigger, better stadium miles from town than the sight of a completely empty Lansdowne Road terrace at the final competitive game in a group which Ireland have a real chance of winning. The final competitive game, indeed, which the team will play at home for a year. Wonderful.

The fuss over No Income Park and the prospects of it being built or being anything but a drain on soccer's resources is small beer in comparison to the wars which are fought in American cities week-in, week-out on the issue of stadiums and the precise amount of public funding which should go into them. Nevertheless, we can learn. Looking in from the outside, one would be forgiven for thinking that this is a boom-time for American sports. Everywhere teams are abandoning relatively new stadiums and arenas and building spanking new facilities which are designed to shoehorn in as many executive boxes as human rights organisations and safety officers will permit.

In Denver, where they paid $12 million to upgrade the McNichols Arena in 1986, they are now fizzing $170 million on the Pepsi Centre; in Indiana, they are abandoning the 25-year-old Market Square Arena for the extraordinarily lovely, retro-designed $183 million Conseco Fieldhouse; in Atlanta, just three years after the Olympics, they apparently find it necessary to abandon the Omni Coliseum to tune into the $213 million Phillips Arena.

Over in San Francisco, however, a truly ground-breaking event in American sport is about to happen. The San Francisco Giants baseball outfit are about to build their own stadium (retro designed, naturally) without using so much as a single cent of public funding. It's a lovely sight, and next season, when Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs visits town as the greatest single season home run hitter of all time, if he can drive a home run over the backfield fences it will drop into San Francisco Bay. There are lots of interesting things we might learn from the San Francisco venture. Like No Income Park, it has had its name tag flogged off to the telephone company and will be known as Pacific Bell Park. Unlike No Income Park, or even the new Croke Park, however, the design is comforting, intimate and redolent of the old-fashioned notions people still hold about sport. Stadium design in Ireland and in Britain seems most oppressive, impersonal and unimaginative at present. Great swathes of concrete, symmetrical buildings and the sort of designs which the Evening Herald (where the Sixties never stopped) likes to call Space Age.

San Francisco (along with several other cities) has managed to come up with a 41,000 capacity stadium which is a landmark while also being friendly, intimate and potentially profitable. Like most new stadia, it has left behind the dreary concept of a "green field site somewhere on the city's apron" and is a short walk from the heart of downtown San Francisco.

That philosophy, together with a stadium which enhances the landscape, enables the facility to take advantage of the city and draw visitors all year round to its restaurants and shops.

The economics of this achievement are interesting. Of the $319 million which the stadium will cost, $130 million was raised through sponsorship, naming rights and long-term seat sales, while $170 million was borrowed. The debt will cost $17 million a year to finance. The real difference with the FAI's model is that the stadium will have an income of at least $125 million through the gates. The Giants play a regular season of 162 games, which gives them 81 games at home and all the marketing, merchandising and TV deal possibilities which that entails. The FAI runs its offices and leagues, etc., with the international team as its biggest resource.

Even if we are on the cusp of a welcome and exciting era in Irish soccer, No Income Park doesn't make sense. Even if it's feasible, it's not the best option.

We have just finished a qualifying campaign which began a year ago and has provided competitive matches against just four countries: Yugoslavia, Malta, Macedonia and Croatia. We won't start into the World Cup campaign until autumn 2000. That's four competitive games in two years, none of them against top line attractions and a schedule fattened with such gristle as friendlies may provide.

All empirical evidence drawn from elsewhere suggests that the upkeep and maintenance of a remote, modern technology-driven stadium requires a little more than that. Here in Chicago, for instance, the ill-starred White Sox replaced their old, sedate Comiskey Park with a brand new techno monster out on the southside of the city just seven years ago. Attendances are pitiful, a man and his granddaughter were almost beaten to death outside the building before a game last week, and the White Sox are peddling their skinny asses to the telephone companies hoping to ditch the name Comiskey which has been associated with them for a century.

So again, we say, bring rugby and soccer to the docklands. Build something which will enhance the city and not the egos of some men in suits.