IBROX STADIUM, GLASGOW
Ibrox Stadium, originally Ibrox Park, is the stadium of Rangers F.C. It is located on the south side of the River Clyde in the Ibrox district of Glasgow.
The site of Ibrox Park has been the home of Rangers since 1899. In 1929 the construction of the Main Stand, to the south side of the ground, began. Its designer was Archibald Leitch, the Scottish engineer responsible for stands at the grounds of Arsenal, Manchester United, Everton, Tottenham Hotspur, Chelsea and Aston Villa. Leitch's work was later to become amongst the most celebrated of football architecture.
The Main Stand at Ibrox provides a classic example of Leitch's characteristic style of criss-cross steelwork balustrades. Like Leitch's stand and pavilion at Fulham's Craven Cottage, the architectural significance of the Ibrox Main Stand is reflected in its status as a listed building.
With the Main Stand completed, the bowl-shaped ground was one of Britain's largest football stadia, second only to Hampden Park, also in Glasgow's south side. A record crowd of 118,567 gathered in January 1939 for a league match with Celtic. This remains the record attendance for a league match in Britain.
The appearance of the stadium changed little for several decades, until a dramatic redevelopment over the final decades of the twentieth century. The first major innovation came with the construction of the Copland, Broomloan and Govan stands in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This involved a radical reshaping of the stadium, with the old bowl-shaped configuration replaced by three new, freestanding stands, alongside the remaining Main Stand. The spur was the Ibrox_disaster of 1971, which prompted the club, led by General Manager Willie Waddell, to begin to develop a more modern - and safe - stadium.
This involved the removal of, first, the east terracing (the traditional Rangers end, sometimes colloquially called 'the Derry') and its replacement with the 7,500-seat Copland Road stand. An identical stand on the west side of the ground, the Broomloan, was added a year later. The redevelopment was completed with the 11,000-seat Govan stand, which replaced the benched-seating Centenary Stand, built in 1973.
The result of this ambitious redevelopment was what was widely acknolwedged as by far the most modern club football ground in Britain.
A capacity of around 44,000 was considerably smaller than the 85,000 or so that had preceded it. However, the redeveloped Ibrox, with some 36,000 seats, foreshadowed the advent of all-seated stadia for all Britain's principal football clubs, as required by the Taylor Report of 1989.
A further series of developments was instituted in the early 1990s to enable the stadium to comply with the requirements of the Taylor Report. A third tier - the Club Deck - was added to Leitch's Main Stand. The remaining standing areas of the ground, the east and west enclosures of the Main Stand, were seated at around the same time. In an effort to expand the stadium's capacity, the configuration of the now all-seated stadium was altered in the mid-1990s, and two additional areas of seating added in the spaces between the Govan and Copland/Broomloan stands. The stadium's all-seated capacity in 2005 was 50,411.
The ground's name was officially changed to Ibrox Stadium after its most recent renovation, completed in 1997.
The stadium is one of slightly more than 20 European stadiums which have UEFA's 5-star rating, enabling it to host finals of the UEFA Champions League and the European Championship.
The club is now looking into further expansions of the stadium, with a casino and leisure complex costing £150 million on the way. Rangers are also looking into expanding the stadium by up to 4,000 seats through the adding of rows onto the Govan Rear and by removing the Argyle House. This would also give space for a proposed "Beer Hall". The posibility of the pitch being lowered to increase capacity is also being discussed.
Tragically, 66 people died at Ibrox on January 2, 1971 when a crush occurred during an Old Firm match, an incident known as the Ibrox disaster.
Tours of the stadium are available.
From Wikipedia.org, the Free Encyclopedia
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