The football season may be drawing to a close for Manchester City Football Club, but inside the Etihad Stadium, a new challenge is on the horizon.
Since 2023, contractor John Sisk has been building a new North Stand, adding 6,000 seats to increase the total capacity to 61,000 – making it the fourth-largest club stadium in the UK.
The £300m redevelopment will include a new 401-room hotel – the largest outside of London – with a sky bar, offices, club shop and museum, as well as a covered fan park for 3,000 people.
The project has already thrown up obstacles, with the team having to work around the football fixture list – and even a Paul McCartney concert.
But the clock is ticking on another key challenge.
Manchester City will complete its final home game of the season against Bournemouth on 20 May.
Sisk’s team will then have just six weeks to lower the stadium’s current roof onto the pitch for dismantling and transfer it in small sections through the players’ tunnel, before the groundsmen need to relay the turf in time for the new season.
“We’ve got a fairly tough few weeks ahead,” Sisk project director Ian Kasher told Construction News.
“The old roof needs to be out in four weeks before the new one can be fully fitted, and then the cladding and floodlights will need to be added.
“The groundsmen need four weeks to relay the grass, so we only have six weeks on the pitch and then the groundsmen take over; there is a one-week buffer in case we have bad weather.”
The crew has been building the North Stand’s new roof over the top of the existing one, which comprises six sections of steel-braced bays, each weighing 45 tonnes. It also has to be watertight six weeks before the old one is removed.
Once the football season ends, aluminium decking will be placed onto the pitch to hold a crane. The pitch area needs to be protected to safeguard against vehicles damaging the underground heating and drainage.
Large sections of roof will then be rotated down onto the pitch to be dismantled.
It might be a challenge dealing with Manchester’s often inclement weather (on average, the city experiences 140 days of rain a year), but it is not the first challenge the project has thrown up.
Kasher, who has previously held posts at real estate developer Everty and structural steel specialist William Hare Group, where he oversaw projects including the development of Battersea Power Station and London Wall Place, had to tackle the daunting task of removing two of the Etihad’s 12 masts without literally bringing the entire roof down.
“It has been complicated engineering,” he said.
“It has been challenging, as the whole of the roof around the stadium is held up by masts and cables. To build the North Stand we had to take out two of the big masts.
“We had to build a sufficient steel structure to transfer the roof onto the new structure, and then we had to demolish the masts from underneath.”
The new core structures were constructed around the existing backstay cables and masts. The force then needed to be transferred from the backstay cables and mast onto the new core structure.
The slightest error in detaching the masts could have led to the whole roof collapsing, but the team found a solution 1,500 miles away.
“The engineering that went into it was amazing,” said Sisk programme director Carl Brierley.
“We found a Portuguese professor who was a specialist in cable tension.
“We flew him over and got him to examine it. He had a headset and hammer and was basically tapping the cables, looking at their frequency to understand what the tension was. It then gave us the alignment for the steel structure, which was 45mm plumb.”
The engineers knew that once the cables were detached from the masts, they only had 20mm to work with to ensure the roof was not damaged.
“We had two tension rods, 4 inches in diameter, next to the plate that these sit on and we had to shorten the rods to pull it back – and we could only pull it back 20mm so it didn’t damage the roof,” Kasher said.
“We took stress out of the cables, which took it forward again and then back again over a period of eight hours. It had to stay in the same position because otherwise the roof would start to dismantle. It was a bit of a nervy time but it all went well.”
On matchdays, fans could have been forgiven for thinking that four lucky employees were getting free passes to watch the game from the new stand, as they sat in the empty seats in their hi-vis vests. But with Manchester renowned for its downpours, Sisk had to install temporary guttering in case a deluge led to a river of water falling on the crowd below during the roof’s construction. The workers have been standing – or sitting – guard to monitor the rain in case action needs to be taken.
Meanwhile, the project has been quite poignant for Brierley, who started his construction career working on Manchester City’s former Maine Road stadium.
Reflecting on the latest build, he adds it has all gone to plan so far: “There hasn’t been anything unexpected. It has been carefully engineered and I don’t think anything has fazed us,” he said.
“It has never been done before like this and I think the hardest part was the load transfer.”
Manchester City FC may have failed to defend their Premier League title this year, but Brierley is confident that the club will have a fresh pitch in time for another push when the new season kicks off on 16 August.
“It’ll be fine, I’m confident,” he said.
“But [a handover date of] 15 August is the worst-case scenario. We’re all set for as soon as the season closes. We’ll be finished in time for the groundsmen to do their job.”
The entire project, including the hotel and museum, is due to be completed by 2026.
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Nicola Harley