Before starting to design a foot­ball stadium – as in the case of many other struc­tures – it is worth consid­ering what it takes to create a good stadium, what the object­ives and the means are, and what will make a building with seem­ingly just one func­tion successful in terms of economic and oper­a­tional aspects. Although this is hard to conceive at first, a facility of this kind is primarily an event hall, some of the events being foot­ball matches. But as we discovered during our research, foot­ball matches make up less than 10% of all events held at the stadium: at best 40, at worst 20–25 matches are held in a stadium each year, while there may be as many as 200- 250 other programs. Natur­ally, not all of them are sell-out events; but let’s be honest: neither are most foot­ball matches; there are only a handful of stadiums in the world that can sustain them­selves from foot­ball – that takes a star club of which there are only 2 or 3 in Europe. In light of these facts, it is important to clarify before­hand what kind of events we are preparing for and what we shall be focusing on. The majority of design changes and modi­fic­a­tions in connec­tion with the Groupama Arena followed from the fact that the object­ives – for lack of exper­i­ence – had to be clari­fied “along the way”, during the design and construc­tion stages.

As the office in charge of design, Artrea Consulting Kft. designed the entire heavy current system and coordin­ated also the weak current systems, while coordin­ating the engin­eering team involved in the design process. About 20 engin­eers in total worked on this project; more than half of them weak current experts. We intro­duced a number of tech­no­lo­gies never before used in Hungary, such as the goal­line system, player tracking system, full Wi-Fi coverage, the Stadium Vision system which integ­rates the entire multi­media system, the system of cameras with full coverage of the stadium that also enables face recog­ni­tion, and so on. We also designed major novel­ties in the heavy current area, thanks to which full HD-TV-lighting, oper­a­tion without gener­ators, and fully flex­ible energy supply become possible.

Any type of event can be catered for, whether held in the arena or inside the event halls of the main building. Elec­tri­city from the two trans­formers is supplied to indi­vidual consumers through nearly 150 km of cables and wires, which distribute a maximum total energy 3 MW. Five designers repres­ented Artrea Consulting Kft. in the design process, throughout almost the entire project: we took part in nearly 200 coordin­a­tion meet­ings and helped contractors meet the extremely short construc­tion dead­line during many hours and days of site super­vi­sion. Natur­ally, we could not have been successful without the highly prepared and enthu­si­astic team of contractors, profes­sional firms, and suppliers!

And what lessons did we learn? We have learnt what makes a stadium a stadium and gained exper­i­ences in the form of new know­ledge and inform­a­tion that will allow us to assist Contractors and our fellow archi­tec­tural designers even more effi­ciently in the future with the construc­tion of the next stadium.

Zoltán Üveges

Facts and numbers

  • Our client: S.A.M.O.
  • Archi­tec­ture: S.A.M.O. 
  • Interior design: MCXVI Archi­tects
  • Area: 19000 m2
  • Year of design: 2013