New stadiums are built to maximize profit for the owners, not to make things better for the fans or teams. Usually, the change is to add private suites; the more of them, the more regular income (since they’re usually sold for an entire season).
Voters are starting to realize that using tax dollars to build a new stadium is wasting money that can better be spent elsewhere.
And maybe the greatest old stadium of all with indisputably the greatest atmosphere…The Rose Bowl.
One other corner-case stadium that was built before 1960: the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum (opened in 1923). It’s a corner case, from the standpoint of the NFL because it’s currently only the temporary home of the Rams, as they await completion of the new Los Angeles Stadium at Hollywood Park in 2020. It had reviously been the home of both the Rams and the Raiders when they had previously been in Los Angeles, and it’s the current home stadium for the University of Southern California.
Though, it’s not the home stadium for a professional team. UCLA plays there, and it’s hosted five Super Bowls, but no NFL team has ever called it home.
USC is currently paying for yet another renovation of the Coluseum and I imagine it will host the Opening Ceremony in the upcoming Los Angeles Olympics.
On top of that, constructing a stadium specifically designated for professional football is probably an unwise decision at this juncture.
Stranger
This is true. Partially because its wealthy neighbors are assholes.
The Rose Bowl has hosted a World Cup final in 1994.
That will pass. Football will always be popular in this country.
Because, of course, they didn’t need to.
Kaufmann Stadium remains up for exactly the same reason Dodger Stadium, which is about the same age, does; it serves its purpose well, and for many of the same reasons.
What makes Kaufmann and Dodger different from other stadia of that era is that they are purpose built ballparks. That is true of literally NO other ballpark from the first era of relocation and expansion. The Royals’ three 1969 expansion brethren were the Expos, Padres, and short-lived-Pilots-became-Brewers, who started out in:
Jarry Park Stadium (Expos) - a ballpark, but very small, a temporary home replaced by Olympic Stadium, a multipurpose stadium
Jack Murphy Stadium (Padres) - a multipurpose stadium
County Stadium (Milwaukee) - a multipurpose stadium
These stadia were all, frankly, mediocre from the get go and ranged from bad (Jack Murphy/Qualcomm) to utterly horrible (Olympic) by the time they were abandoned. Kaufmann Stadium was ALWAYS better than them. In its 1970s heyday it was very commonly referred to as one of the best stadia in North American pro sport.
It started getting dated in the 1990s as newer parks came along but a true ballpark like Kaufmann can be refitted to add things like luxury boxes and widgets and doodads; you cannot, for a practical price, usually rearrange the stands and whatnot to make it truly a baseball stadium. Kaufmann’s late 2000s upgrade really made the place shine. It’s just fabulous.
In other words, the reason they’re still in Kaufmann Stadium is they did a hell of a job building it in the first place.
madsircool: Yes, it’s ingrained. People like to see hitting.
Better helmets, some rules changes, a few long suspensions for the worst violators, that all will take care of it, and it’s well under way if far from complete.
kenobi 65:
I did read the article to which kunilou linked, but I was addressing why they didn’t already have a new stadium, not the issue of a new one in the future.
The Rose Bowl stadium is down in the Arroyo Seco, a deep valley lacking direct freeway access which means that attendees have to drive through the curvy residential streets. The surrounding neighborhood is quite accommodating for the Rose Bowl game, Bruins games, and the sporadic other events, but adding a regular football schedule is asking a bit much, especially when many normal routes for people in the neighborhood to get from and to their homes are cut off before and after games. You’d be an “asshole”, too, if access to your home were cut off every weekend for hours at a time.
Professional football in the United States has existed for less than a century and as a “national pastime” with regularly televised games only since 1958.
“Better helmets, some rules changes, a few long suspensions,” do not mitigate the fact that a sport in which players directly impact each other will result in concussions and traumatic brain injuries regardless of any rules or external protection to the head. Many concussions occur not due to helmet-to-helmet contact (which is generally a direct forward impact) but by uncontrolled contact to the ground, resulting in side and twisting impacts which tend to cause more severe concussions. There is literally no way to reduce this without substantially altering the contact aspect of the game, and professional flag football is not going to bring in the billions of dollars of revenue needed to sustain the NFL.
And just the potential liability from the NFL and team owners concealing knowledge of potential CTE injury may be enough to bankrupt the league as the evidence becomes more damning and methods are developed to diagnose traumatic brain injury in living patients. CTE is a chronic and progressive syndrome and there is no expectation of being able to develop an existing treatment in the foreseeable future.
The NFL has about another decade worth of life in it—maybe fifteen years on the outside—before the combination of liability, reducing revenues, and lack of feeder stocks of new players renders it non-viable. College football will likely continue in some fashion with much reduced contact and other rules to minimize CTE-generating injuries, but full contact professional football is going to become about as popular as smoking in a nursery as the evidence for the inevitability of CTE mounts, and it would be foolish for municipalities to invest in dedicated stadiums to lure or keep football teams. Not that this has stopped Los Angeles, which can’t seem to keep a team for very long regardless of what it offers.
Stranger
An NFL club has eight regular season home games baring playoffs and almost all of them are on sundays. The local opposition is NIMBYism. The Rose Bowl is also used as a concert venue.
And your analysis of the future of football is ridiculous. Is boxing dying? MMA? Hockey? No. And our ever increasing Latino population are huge sports fans.
I still don’t see how they’re assholes.
This is at least partly true. Several architecturally soulless, cookie-cutter, multi-purpose stadiums–many of which were too big for baseball–were built in the 20th century and there was a spate of construction starting in the early '80s to replace them, not only to put in luxury amenities, but to also be more cozy and attractive for fans.
The new stadiums tended to reflect “traditional” architecture, as opposed to the concrete doughnuts that were largely replaced by smaller, single-sport venues.
Most of the older stadiums were bland and ugly and undistinguished/indistinguishable architecturally and largely aren’t missed.–
Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, 1965, replaced by Turner Field in 1996
Baltimore Memorial Stadium, 1922, replaced by Oriole Park at Camden Yards in 1998
Bloomington Metropolitan Stadium, 1956, replaced by the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in 1982, in turn replaced by Target Field in 2010
Cincinnati Riverfront Stadium, 1970, replaced by the Great American Ballpark in 2002
Cleveland Municipal Stadium, 1932, replaced by Jacobs Field in 1993
Denver Mile High Stadium, 1948, replaced by Coors Field in 1995
Houston Astrodome, 1965, replaced by Minute Maid Park in 2000
Milwaukee County Stadium, 1953, replaced by Miller Park in 2001
Philadelphia Veterans Stadium, 1971, replaced by Citizens Bank Park in 2004
Pittsburgh Three Rivers Stadium, 1970, replaced by PNC Park in 2001
Queens Shea Stadium, 1964, replaced by Citi Field in 2009
St. Louis Busch Memorial Stadium, 1966, replaced by another Busch Stadium in 2006
San Francisco Candlestick Park, 1960, replaced by AT&T Park in 2000
Seattle Kingdome, 1976, replaced by Safeco Field in 1999
Washington Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium, 1961, replaced by Nationals Park in 2008
– The fact that Kauffman Stadium in Kansas City (1973) is attractive and still well-liked by fans makes it a notable exception.
Stranger, if the big problem with CTE is contact with the ground, couldn’t you improve the situation by changing the ground?
Yes, it is NIMBYism. Because these people literally don’t want tens of thousands of people in their backyard. Neither would you if you literally had a professional football stadium in your neighborhood without adequate traffic access or parking.
so, you are going to claim that my assessment is “ridiculous”, but without actually presenting any rebuttal of the points I’ve made?
Yes, we’ll start hosting professional football games in 100 yard long bouncy castles. I like the way you think!
Stranger
Slight correction; the Kingdome replaced by both Safeco and Centurylink Field. The Kingdome was shared by both the Mariners baseball team and Seahawks football team. Now each team plays in a separate stadium. This goes back to what you said about modern stadiums being designed for particular sports as oppposed to being generic, multipurpose facilities.
I’d watch it! You could have some spectacular leaping plays.
That’s true of several of the stadiums on the list. I didn’t bother to go into the full details and the football-only successors.