Rugby Stadium of Tomorrow Design Exercise

Today’s rugby fans are among the world’s most passionate sports enthusiasts, and they have a growing appetite for engaging game-day experiences.

To generate ideas for enhancing the stadium experience for fans and athletes, HOK led a collaborative design exercise with four legendary rugby players. Jamie Roberts (Wales), Tim Visser (Scotland), James Horwill (Australia) and Danny Care (England) shared their ideas about the attributes of an ideal stadium and what inspires them as athletes and fans.

The input from these world-class players helped shape several new design concepts for the rugby stadium of the future.

1/6

Strengthening relationships between fans and players: Stadiums with smaller footprints and steeper, more three-dimensional stands create intimate connections between fans and players. Divisions between the concourses and stands are blurred. The focus expands beyond pure viewing parameters to the entire stadium experience.

2/6

Fields of screens: Integrating fiber-optics could transform the pitch into a green screen for projecting real-time statistics and other information, replaying highlights and acting as a canvas for e-sports. GPS player tracking systems that measure everything from the distance run by individual players to the force of collisions could be made available to fans. A movable overhead gantry could project a laser to mark the gain line while providing captivating aerial perspectives for spectators.

3/6

Boosting energy in the red zone: As a throwback to the rugby stadiums of the 1960s, enlarged standing areas in the red zone—the area of the pitch between the touch line and 22 meters out—could amplify overall noise and energy levels by increasing the density of enthusiastic fans in these action-fueled zones.

4/6

Engaging bench players: The bench could be actively linked with the entertainment system. When a coach selects bench players to enter the game, for example, their seats could light up and be featured on the video boards.

5/6

Positioning the stadium as a community asset: Designers can think about the venue as a vertical park in the heart of a city, an ad hoc meeting place or a hub of leisure activity.

6/6

Explore More

Explore More

Your browser is out-of-date!