We asked AI to design Manchester United’s new ground as club unveil huge 100,000-seater stadium

115 years after it first opened, Old Trafford is reaching the end of its lifespan. The club have now formally announced the construction a new stadium at the cost of £2bn which will seat 100,000 fans and shelter a public plaza twice the size of Trafalgar Square beneath a colossal tent-like structure. It’s a brave new world for the club but perhaps a sad end for the Theatre of Dreams, with its leaking roof and the football on the pitch scarcely worthy of the grand old ground’s history.

Before the new stadium was formally unveiled in March, we wanted to know what it might look like, so we decided to do it the best (and cheapest and easiest) way we could think of – and asked AI to design a new stadium for us. So it was that we found ourselves shovelling prompts into an algorithm to see what it would spit out, only to be pleasantly surprised by the results… So how do they compare with reality? Could the computers come up with a better design than the gigantic circus tent dreamed up by actual, real-life architects? Let’s take a look...

What Manchester United’s new ground will look like

Let’s start with the most important aspect of designing our New Trafford – how it will look from the outside. To our mild shock, the AI actually came up with a pretty impressive concept.

Kicking off with a description of “a beacon of transformation, turning the gritty backdrop of industry into a theatre of dreams” – proof, perhaps, that PR copywriters really do need to worry about AI taking their jobs – the software goes on to explain that it envisages a façade that would “mimic the look of a giant, red brick industrial furnace, symbolizing the club's rebirth from the ashes of its past. The structure would be adorned with steel beams and rivets, reminiscent of old Manchester factories but with modern, sleek lines.”

Honestly, this stadium – to be called The Red Forge - actually sounds pretty remarkable, albeit deeply expensive, and clearly the AI has been fed plenty of information about Manchester’s industrial heritage, ironically something which would be referenced in United’s real-life announcement video just a few short weeks later, even if the club didn’t actually use that idea in a single element of the final design. A giant furnace rearing up above the banks of the Irwell would certainly have been more thematically appropriate, and perhaps more spectacular.

“At night, LED lights would mimic the glow of molten steel, creating a mesmerising effect visible from miles away, beckiting fans to the hallowed ground,” the AI continues, apparently unaware that ‘beckiting’ isn’t a word. “The south stand (the Stretford End) will be designed to look like a giant bellows, inflating with the roar of the fans, enhancing the acoustics to make the atmosphere even more electric.”

A bellows-shaped stand in a giant furnace genuinely sounds pretty incredible, although quite how it would be made to inflate with the roar of the crowd is unclear. There have certainly been plenty of recent matches during which the team’s performance wouldn’t have caused it to move very much. Of course, we also had to ask the AI to show us what this looked like, so here goes…

OK, look, if there is one thing that AI is categorically rubbish at, it’s pictures. For starters, no matter how many times we typed in “yeah, WITH THE BELLOWS BIT”, it never got the hint. Perhaps it doesn’t actually know what bellows are and just likes using the word.

The rest of the image doesn’t exactly live up to the promises of virtual molten steel raining down onto a giant furnace, and we’re not sure why all of Old Trafford’s roof supports have been slapped on top like a giant game of Kerplunk! We’re even less sure why one of the stands seems to have been built outside of the ground, a design flaw that somewhat undermines AI’s credentials as the future of architecture.

In short, while you can get some pretty good stuff out of AI when you ask it the right questions, don’t ask it to do your homework, because the text is usually not much better than the image generation when you start double-checking it. Our double-beckiting it, perhaps.

What amenities will The Red Forge have?

Still, the written concept remains intriguing even if the images weren’t quite up to snuff – but what will The Red Forge have going on inside that furnace-and-bellows structure? Will there be a cheese shop, like the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium nearly had? A Greggs instead? A Fulham-style rooftop swimming pool?

Once again, we have to begrudgingly acknowledge that the algorithm has a certain flair for design when it comes to the interior – and we’re particularly keen on The Steam Gallery.

“These are a network of tunnels under the stands,” the AI explains, “where the air is filled with steam (from safe, theatrical machines), leading fans to various amenities like bars and shops, each named after key moments or players in club history.”

Honestly, that sounds pretty cool, and if all the concession stands are underneath the ground it leaves more room for the people to get in and out during the game, which would be nice. Getting a pie and a pint and getting back in time for the second half sounds challenging, admittedly, but that’s tough enough when it’s a hole in the wall in a League One stadium.

Then there’s The Machine Room, which consists of “a fan zone where historical machinery from Manchester's industrial past would be displayed, alongside interactive exhibits about the club's history. Here, fans could engage with holograms of legendary players explaining tactics or recounting famous matches.”

Again, that actually does sound pretty great. Who wouldn’t want to hear about the 1968 European Cup win, recounted by Sir Bobby Charlton himself? Well, any visiting Benfica fans, probably, and certainly anyone who has ethical queries about virtual recreations of the deceased, but still… there’s an undeniable flair to the idea.

Perhaps AI will fare better when asked to offer us an interior view of our new stadium, ideally from one of the stands that isn’t in the car park? Well… not really, no:

Let’s address the minor issue here – where rows of seats should be, there appears to be a mas of writhing eldritch horrors, spreading their hairy tentacles out to consume the souls of everyone in the stadium. Which feels unrealistic, although it could be that the AI has improvised a visual metaphor for the Glazers’ ownership. Either way, it appears to have warped space and time, or at least the pitch, given that the halfway line is several yards behind the centre circle, and wobbles about all over the place. Maybe Ratcliffe laid off the ground staff who paint the lines, too.

Still, apparently the ground would also come with a fancy way to help those elements of the crowd which haven’t been dragged screaming into The Upside Down a fancy way to keep track of how much the visiting team are winning by.

“A giant, functional chimney would serve as a scoreboard. When goals are scored, fireworks would shoot out from the top, echoing the industrial age's steam and smoke, but in celebration.”

Again, a pretty cool idea which, for some reason, the algorithm is completely incapable of visualising no matter how much we ask. Perhaps we just don’t know the right prompts. Or maybe AI technology is vastly over-rated, and Manchester United were better off hiring actual flesh-and-blood architects instead. You decide…