London’s new Olympic Stadium unfit for Premier League football

The Olympic Park Legacy Company has known for quite some time now that the brand new London Olympic Stadium is going to be rented out after the 2012 Olympics to an English Premier League (EPL) soccer club among others. But, incredibly, the stadium hasn’t been built to meet the standards of the EPL.

The EPL states that all of its teams need to have an under-soil heating system or something just as efficient in place to melt snow and ice during the winter so the fields are playable and games don’t have to be cancelled.

This means the surface of the new stadium will have to be ripped up after this year’s Olympics if it’s going to be rented out to an EPL team. Of course, taxpayer money is going to be used because it’s publicly owned and the stadium has already cost approximately $767 million to build. West Ham United wanted to take over the stadium after the Games and was willing to pay about $3 million to put in a new playing surface which included underground heating.

However, other soccer teams and sports organizations complained that they also wanted to use the stadium and a long-term agreement with West Ham was thrown out because of legal challenges. West Ham will still be able to rent the venue, but won’t have to pay the costs of transforming the stadium. This bit of news didn’t sit too well with Andrew Boff, a London Assembly member, and he told the Associated Press that the new stadium has now become a white elephant and money will have to be spent to stop it from being a white elephant.

It’s believed that the stadium won’t survive in the long run unless it’s used by one or more professional soccer clubs. But another problem is that the stadium hasn’t really been built with soccer in mind. It was built as a location to hold athletics and track and field events. Therefore, it has a running track around the field and it will stay there because the World Athletics championships are going to be hosted there in 2017.

Boff said the stadium hasn’t been designed for soccer at all and this has shown how badly it has been planned. He added that there were some awful and shocking decisions made when the stadium was being planned and this has led to the current mess and it needs to be sorted out. The stadium has been designed to hold 80,000 spectators for the Olympics, but after they’ve been completed it’s going to be downsized and converted into a 60,000-seater at the cost of $55 million.

Boff said, he’s not sure why a soccer team would want to use the stadium the way it is and it’s going to cost a lot of money to turn it into a soccer-friendly venue. So far it’s been reported that 16 different organizations are interested in bidding to use the Olympic Stadium in the future, including West Ham, and all formal bids need to be received by March 23. The winning bidders will then be announced two months later, but they won’t be able to use the stadium until 2014 after renovations and downsizing have been performed on it.

Written by Ian Palmer