Book cover for The Stadium Century: Sport, Spectatorship and Mass Society in Modern France The Stadium Century: Sport, Spectatorship and Mass Society in Modern France
Robert W. Lewis
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Conclusion

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Robert W. Lewis
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Oxford Academic
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https://doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9781526106247.003.0007
Pages
209–212
  • Published:
    08 December 2016

Extract

The construction of the Stade de France has certainly not ended the debates over stadia in modern France. Much to the surprise of many people, the French rugby federation (FFR) announced its plans in late June 2012 to build its own 82,000-person stadium south of Paris, in the suburb of Evry-Essonne, at the site of the old hippodrome of Ris-Orangis. The FFR initially projected that the stadium could be ready by 2017 at the earliest and 2030 at the latest; as of late 2015, the FFR hoped to use the projected stadium as the centrepiece for its bid to host the 2023 Rugby World Cup.1 The new stade, in the words of FFR president Pierre Camou, would be a ‘modern, multifunctional stadium’ with ‘exceptional comfort’ for spectators.2 According to the FFR, the new stadium would also be designed to make rather than lose money; the federation has argued that it lost at least 160 million euros between 1998 and 2008 because of the terms of the contract that tied it to the Stade de France for major international matches.3 Building its own stadium would certainly allow the FFR alone to benefit from gate receipts, television rights and sponsorship arrangements. But the FFR’s project has been greeted with everything from scepticism to downright hostility. Economists question whether the FFR could actually build its own stadium with entirely private funding (as it has proposed) and support it on the basis of rugby, concerts and theatrical spectacles. The consortium running the Stade de France, for its part, has argued that the Parisian region cannot sustain two grands stades. And the national government was predictably lukewarm about the idea of a new stadium siphoning off revenue from the Stade de France, at least in the years before the infamous ‘compensation clause’ in the contract between the state and the consortium was eliminated in 2013.4

Subject
European History Modern History (1700 to 1945)
Collection: Manchester Scholarship Online
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