This piece first appeared on the UK Sport Industry Awards platform.
As the sports industry heads into 2025, the concept of the fan experience is more diffuse than ever before. Different sets of supporters exhibit a plethora of behaviours and demands – whether it’s across a vast range of media platforms or, increasingly, within live sports venues themselves.
“The sector is changing faster and faster,” suggests Maria Knutsson-Hall, a Principal and EMEA Design Quality Lead at global architectural group Populous. “We work with large infrastructure projects and audiences and consumers obviously take in influences from all other different sectors. They are expecting experiences and a product that is in line with our everyday life.”
In 2024, ideas of what a sports and entertainment venue can look like continued to progress and proliferate. Populous was itself behind key projects on both sides of the Atlantic: like Manchester’s Co-op Live, an indoor arena that aims to combine stripped-back intimacy for musical performances with seamless partner and technological integrations, or the staggering Las Vegas Sphere, which blends cutting-edge acoustics for immersion on an unprecedented scale. A second version of the Sphere is planned for construction in Abu Dhabi.
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Yet that pace of change also applies to existing venues.
Knutsson-Hall’s role at Populous has grown from project-by-project responsibilities as a “design guardian”, consulting with venue owners throughout the construction and operation phase. Notably, that was a function she performed for the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, for which she was also lead designer.
Perhaps the most ambitious new venue in UK sport in the past decade, that 60,000-seater north London ground was completed back in 2019. It is still evolving – both through additional on-site elements like a go-kart track, opened in 2024 in partnership with Formula 1 – and the more nuanced understanding of the possibilities its design presents. Knutsson-Hall points, for example, to the retractable pitch installed to allow a seamless transition between Premier League football and NFL International Series games.
“Once the sliding pitch is out,” she explains, “it’s a concrete deck that’s open for anything. So, it has meant that a concert doesn’t just have to be performed in the summer season when football is not happening. It can be done in the middle of a football season, if you wish.”
The promise of a modern venue, in other words, is that it can become a setting for more than one type of experience. The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium that fans enjoy on Premier League matchdays – and, more and more often, for Women’s Super League games – is subtly different from the one that fans of rugby, the NFL, boxing or live music might visit.
Buildings like these are capable of radical flexibility – Knutsson-Hall cites their pandemic-era repurposing as evidence of how far they can be pushed – but those more creative executions depend on thoughtful planning that accounts for emerging technology, taste and environmental standards. At the same time, venues cannot be considered as an entirely blank canvas for events.
“Because there’s so many technologies and experiences and ways to deliver out on the market today,” says Knutsson-Hall, “you cannot forget the core fans and the core people going to the building. People have visited stadiums for hundreds of years and, although this experience might be new for some people, others see them as their second home.”
In that context, engineering a compelling experience is not just about reaching a commercial or operational end point, but guiding thousands of personal journeys. Knutsson-Hall notes, for instance, how much technological innovation is now “hidden” from the fan to improve access, circulation and retail or concessions processes.
“More and more you can even keep your ticket in your pocket, right?”
