GROUND DESIGNS
First pics of world’s biggest football stadium emerge with incredible roof design as 115,000-seater will host World Cup
The architects have experience of building state-of-the-art football stadiums
THE first pictures of an amazing 115,000-seater stadium expected to host the 2030 World Cup have been released.
The major tournament six years away is set to go global and be held across three continents.
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Spain, Portugal and Morocco are expected to take on the role of co-hosts, as the only bidders at present - with the opening three matches taking place in Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay to celebrate the World Cup's 100th anniversary.
Morocco want to be the setting for the final and have plans to build the biggest football stadium on the planet.
And computer generated images of what the jaw-dropping arena named the Grand Stade Hassan II might look like have been revealed after a meeting with organising committees.
The stunning design's inspiration comes from traditional Moroccan "Moussem tents".
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It will be designed by architects Populous - who are famous for their work on the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and Lusail Stadium, which hosted the last World Cup final in Qatar.
Local architects Oualalou + Choi are also involved in the project.
The Grand Stade Hassan II will be located in Casablanca.
And preparation work has already begun at a 100-hectare site in the town of El Mansouria near Benslimane Airport after the approval of public financing in October.
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An estimated £400million is set to be spent on building the state-of-the-art stadium and improving surrounding infrastructure.
There is hope the stunning new ground will be completed in 2028.
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Morocco's national team will play there as will the nation's two largest clubs Raja CA and Wydad AC in a ground share.
The largest stadium in the world is currently the Rungrado 1st of May Stadium in North Korea, which has space for 114,000 fans.
This felt like our time... but keep Gareth's culture and we can win it in 2026 instead, writes Jack Wilshere
IT will take a while for me and every England fan to get over this, writes Jack Wilshere.
To come so close to winning that trophy, only to be beaten in a second Euros final in a row, is a huge disappointment.
Especially when it really felt like this was our time.
It seemed that everything was coming together for us to end the long wait for a major title.
But Spain deserved it. They were the better team in the final and the best team of the tournament.
We will all — supporters, players, coaches, the FA — have to move on and go again.
Because English football is still in a good position.
Gareth Southgate has taken us to two finals, a semi-final and a quarter-final in four tournaments. We have never produced a run like that before.
The challenge now is to maintain this level of competitiveness and make England even better.
Southgate and his staff have done a fantastic job in changing the whole environment and narrative around the national team.
Now Gareth is gone, the wider culture he has put in place must be preserved.
This tournament was the biggest test of that culture the team had to go through.
They overcame the problems and went all the way, only to fall at the final hurdle.
But there is every reason to believe we can challenge at the World Cup in 2026 and beyond.
We’ve got a really good group of players, many of them young, who can go on playing and performing for England for years.
Jude Bellingham, Kobbie Mainoo, Bukayo Saka, Phil Foden and Cole Palmer — to name just five — have plenty more tournaments in them.
This tournament will also be an inspiration for the next generations of players. Unfortunately there isn’t the trophy lift to take that to a completely different level.
But England have delivered moments in Germany that will be replayed forever.
The Bellingham overhead kick and Ollie Watkins’ semi-final winner will be recreated in playgrounds and cages up and down the country.
What I would like to see now is England continuing to develop, to become a team that can consistently dominate opponents and can give a real identity to English football.
We now have players who are comfortable on the ball and technically very good.
The biggest disappointment of the tournament was that we didn’t see that as often as we would have liked. That leaves us with a ‘what if?’ feeling.
England must not lose that old-school mentality of finding a way to win even when you’re not playing well — that never-say-die spirit which got us through this Euros more than once.
But the next step is to allow other qualities to shine through, to give the players that our system is creating the platform to show everything they can do.
The job for me and for other coaches is to keep producing players that are comfortable on the ball and understand how to perform under pressure at a high level.
English football is in a good place but we need to keep going. Then we will finally get over the line.
Real all of SunSport columnist Jack Wilshere's Euro 2024 columns...
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