Phil Rawlins, president of Orlando City, has said the Major League Soccer (MLS) team’s new football-specific stadium will create a “bone rattling” atmosphere, adding that the structure has been designed to give the home team more of an advantage.
Due to open in 2017, the 25,500-capacity Orlando City stadium will serve as the new home of both the MLS team and sister club Orlando Pride.
Speaking on the team’s official website, Rawlins said the club looked at a host of other stadiums both abroad and in the US before finalising the design of the new stadium, saying that it will be different than any other open sports venue in the country.
“We looked at a lot of stadiums,” Rawlins said. “We looked at several stadiums in Europe; we looked at many English Premier League stadiums, but also we looked at stadiums in MLS that had been built recently here in the States. We’ve been to many, many different stadiums…took what we thought was the best of those stadiums and brought them to our home here in Orlando.
“Really, first and foremost, the design criteria is to make a traditional soccer-specific stadium that our fans could really call their home and make very loud and very passionate. We want it to be a very passionate base, a very exciting place to come, a great place for our players to play and a horrible place for the opponents to play. So our design criteria is really built around that.
“We’re talking about a stadium that’s very vertical, very erect, very upright. It’s on top of the field. That creates a different feeling. I want people’s bones to rattle when they walk into that stadium.”
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