#stadiums

In his book, Sport: A Philosophic Enquiry, Paul Weiss presents a normative model of the sports place. He argues that ideally the sports place should have ‘a normal set of conditions’, where there is no wind, no interference and no surface irregularities – ‘in short no deviations from a standard situation’. Mirroring Weiss, it has been suggested more recently that to satisfy the norms of achievement sport, the ideal stadium would be characterized by ‘placelessness’ – a plane surface without spectators, communicated televisually to an audience which constitutes an absent presence. This, it must be admitted, is (for fans, at least) a dystopian dream, yet there is more than a suggestion that the world of sport is moving towards a landscape of anaesthesia.