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National sports stadiums are often deeply affected by the politics of identity and mythology. Questions of ‘nationality’ and the responsibility of safeguarding the idea of a specific ‘national’ sports culture often take a central position in the rhetoric surrounding national sports stadiums. This also has an impact on how they are designed, developed and operated. In this paper, we explore the legacy of Nordic national football stadiums. Our main case is Ullevål stadium in Oslo, which we compare with the national football stadiums in Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Sweden. Through this study, we compare the changing functions and symbolic significances of the respective stadiums in light of national sports narratives and architectural qualities. We argue that the meaning of national stadiums is influenced both by assumptions about national sports identity and expectations embedded in football architecture. A key finding is that the modernist idiom of ‘form follows function’ still seems to reign as a token of football stadium quality, in contrast to the idea of the postmodern stadium, associated with aesthetic confusion, shallow commodification, and the relegation of football to a secondary role. Yet we also found that typical modernist and postmodernist features often co-exist, with examples of multi-functionality evident throughout the history of the national Nordic football stadiums. Another crucial finding is that history continues to play a part in the contemporary configurations of Nordic national stadiums, even in cases where the physical stadium heritage has been completely obliterated or reconstructed beyond recognition from its original physical design. From a theoretical point of view, we build on previous scholarly work on national sports culture, Nordic football culture in particular, as well as geographical, anthropological and architectural studies of football stadiums. Archival research, document studies and literature review are the primary methodological approaches.

Nordic national football stadiums: past and present