Stadium thread

une fois n'est pas coutume, i'm on oheme's side here. it's the city's joint, they decided and did the renovation, it's their budget. raising the rent to some extent, of course, but not to the extent they tried to.

it's the same argument as we had here a few years back when some locals took the city and the the club to court over the "sweetheart" fees OL was paying to play in gerland. what these anal-retentive pseudointellectual grinches refused to get into their heads is the immense fallout a city gets from a team like OL or OM. in the 20 years i've lived here lyon has gone from a fairly anonymous provincial city to a vibrant major player in europe. OL didn't do that, but the recognition the team and their CL runs brought was a big motor in that change of image. a city, whether it's lyon or marseille or santa clara has good reasons to "subsidize" this kind of venture.

another important point: if OM is the major, almost sole user of the velo, they're not forcing anyone out, there are no other takers (except an occasional cameo by les bleus... like 2016, which marseille would never have got w/o this renovation). when OL moves to the grand stade, gerland would have become a white elephant if the LOU hadn't made the top 14, and they're going to cut it down almost to half as it is.

last point in my diatribe: if you think OM's management is a hot mess don't look too close at marseille's city gov't. crikey!

 

i live so close to matmut that if ES Trinité isn't playing at the same time i can hear it in my backyard when the LOU scores a try.

the original plan (which was refused because was already for those near 12,000 seats, so all the project phase of this extension is already done. what's more, the whole structure is temporary (of surprising quality for prefab, but still prefab) and when the existing stadium was put up in EIGHT-THREE days. tomorrow i'm going by it again, i'll take some pics for you to see how far the work is, but my guess is it's almost finished... and it only started a couple of weeks ago!

expanding the subject around the stadium, there is no way that place can be the permanent home of the LOU. there is almost no parking to speak of, and the extension takes a sizeable bite of what there was. on game day streets and sidewalks around there, and all the way to my block become impassible. they even have to reroute the buses.

the reason this solution was thought up, and the only reason it was ever accepted by the municipality was because it was temporary. the T14 isn't going to want one of their top drawing cards to play forever in almost the smallest park in T14-D2.

by the time gerland is ready for them (2018) matmut is going to be pretty rickety... it's not called temporary for nothing.

so it's pretty much a done deal all around.

 

almost forgot the follow-up i promised... sorry!

here are the pics i took the other day:
this is the "silver" parking lot which has lost about half of its original 100 or so spots to make room for lavatories that were originally where the new stand went, and for more concessions stands.

the presexisting stand, just to show that if it's all nice and fresh now it really is just prefab.


here's the concession stand now; though it would almost do for a french football crowd where nosh is not a habit and there's never real beer on pour, is ridiculous for rugby.

 

three views of the new west stand which is already finished! pretty good work since they only got the building permit on July 8th. in the top photo you can see that from the inside it's hard to tell it's just "algeco". the last picture kind of emphasizes that the lot is full as an egg: right behind me is an off-ramp for the periph. and notice that the ground is all gravel. temporary like i said.

 

the silver lot was the only one i'd ever seen, but the sign outside it gave directions to "gold" and "bronze" so i cycled over there. here's gold... which is the LOU's everyday parking lot; you can't see it all here but i counted 47 spots. just about enough for the players and the club officials, and the visitor's bus which i think parks at the right.

bronze i found out exists no more, the sign has been pulled down, and where the gate has not just been padlocked but cinderblocked over. on googlesatted i discovered it was a disused aluminum foundry which i knew well (one of my main suppliers for years before they folded) but had never seen from that angle. all the open space had been marked for parking and it came to 190 spots. the LOU now announces on their site that there is a lot available to replace it with 151 spots... a 7 min shuttle ride away. good luck with that! it was probably only dreamed up because the venissieux city council was never going to green light anything without at least a token effort to replace the lost bronze lot.

all the parking is free, but you have to reserve ahead of time on the LOU website. but it's all academic anyway: 64+47=151= 262 parking spots for 11805 people? you're kidding me right? especially since rugby is very much a country person's gig compared to football, and almost all these people come in cars. and though there's a tram stop not far, but the metro is not convenient.

i'm going to go to a match soon with a buddy, and will get some pics of what the streets look like on gameday. it makes chaos look like a north korean military march.

 

oh, and here's a shot of the famous terrain du puisoz, where first the LOU had a project to build a new stadium (like 10-15 years ago) and where OL-Land really should have been built. we have also heard over the years that it was going to become mixed housing and that a new ikea was going in there (the present one is badly squeezed in digs that are too small), what is certain is that the lot belongs to the auchan supermarket group, which also owns decathlon sporting goods and leroy merlin hardware. why they haven't developed it yet is perhaps because they already have a center with all these stores in Bron a few minutes away, perhaps because there's already a huge Carrefour just across the street. one thing's for sure: the terrain de puisoz is the big mystery spot in out part of town; probably auchan as well as the greater lyon council and the city of venissieux all have stage fright on what to do with it. a chunk or real estate of this size in this location isn't even gold, it's a diamond 100 times bigger than the ritz. if they f*** it up people will still be talking about in in 2525. notice it's not even planted anymore; until 3-4 years ago they grew rapeseed on it, a plant with yellow flowers that gave cooking oil and cattle fodder. it's just in suspended animation now.

 

those fools tend to watch on tv anyway if at all. the whole VIP suite experience has only a very tenuous connection to the actual match.

Especially for its acoustics praise for Vélodrome has flooded in since its renovation. But the mew version of Marseilles' stadium isn't to everyone's liking, starting with the architect of the Parc des Princes, Roger Taillibert.

"I don't see an extraordinary structure, I don't see an extraordinary idea. I don't believe much architectural thought went into it. They made a cover which doesn't blend in well with the volumes of the stadium. One has the impression that the roof isn't exactly in scale. It's a kind of limp form that doesn't have any real balance.

it's not because he designed OM's rival's stadium that he said that, taillebert isn't married to PSG and he has designed stadiums all over the world.

I've always felt the exact same thing: the work needed to be done, and in purely practical terms the stadium has been improved greatly. but as an architectural statement it's atrocious. it's as graceful as a hangar for farm equipment.

http://www.maxifoot.fr/info-206633_141021/football.php