Camp Nou is currently undergoing a historic transition, not only in sporting terms but also architecturally and structurally. The shift from the stadium designed by Francesc Mitjans in the mid-twentieth century to the new twenty-first-century stadium clearly reveals the evolution of construction systems, structural thinking, and the relationship between architecture, engineering, and sporting spectacle.
In 1954, Francesc Mitjans was commissioned to design the new stadium for Futbol Club Barcelona. A well-established architect with an extensive professional career, Mitjans approached the project with a methodological rigor that was uncommon at the time. Before defining the proposal, he undertook a study trip to the main European stadiums -Paris, Rome, London, Zurich, Helsinki- analysing solutions, geometries, and seating systems. From these journeys he often highlighted what worked and what did not, until a later visit to the Maracanã finally consolidated the idea of a large-scale, monumental stadium. Although he rejected its excessively oval layout, which distanced part of the audience from the pitch, he adopted its scale and ambition as key references.
Upon returning to Barcelona, the initial programme was expanded and the planned capacity significantly increased, leading to the acquisition of additional land and placing considerable financial strain on the club for decades. The final project, developed together with Josep Soteras Mauri and Lorenzo García-Barbón, resulted in a stadium for nearly 100,000 spectators, expandable and with a powerful image, becoming one of the major works of European sports architecture of its time.
In this project, Josep Soteras’ contribution was particularly significant in the geometric definition of the seating tiers. A few years earlier, Soteras had designed the main stand of the former Sarrià stadium, an innovative work due to its oval geometry and excellent visibility from any point. That solution, based on a very precise relationship between slope, distance, and visual field, was later transferred to Camp Nou, this time deployed through 360 degrees. In this way, Camp Nou incorporated a geometric logic originating in Sarrià, showing that, from an architectural standpoint, sporting rivalry was of secondary importance.
For more than half a century, the image of the stadium has been defined by this continuous seating bowl and by the roof over the main stand, a clear and direct structure, light in appearance and counterbalanced by the stand’s façade. However, the new Camp Nou definitively abandons this logic in favour of a radically different structural system.
The future roof is conceived as a large cable-stayed structure based on two oval-shaped steel rings: an inner ring, initially located at pitch level, and an outer ring, positioned from the outset at the upper level of the third tier. Both rings will be connected by large-diameter braided steel cables working entirely in tension. The construction process is particularly singular: the inner ring will be progressively lifted by the simultaneous and balanced tensioning of all the cables, until it is suspended over the stadium in its final position.
From a structural point of view, the system can be understood as a bicycle wheel of exceptional dimensions. Unlike a conventional wheel, where only the upper spokes effectively work in tension, in this case all the cables participate simultaneously in the system’s equilibrium, producing a much more homogeneous and stable behaviour. This type of solution derives directly from the pioneering work of Frei Otto and Jörg Schlaich, particularly the tensile roofs of the Munich Olympic Park for the 1972 Games, an absolute reference in contemporary structural engineering.
Although there are other stadiums with similar systems, such as Madrid’s Wanda Metropolitano, Seville’s Estadio de la Cartuja, or partially San Mamés in Bilbao, the fundamental difference of Camp Nou lies in its scale. Once completed, the proposed roof will be the largest cable-stayed roof ever built in the world.
Despite its contemporary appearance, this system is not as new as it might seem. As early as the beginning of the twentieth century, Antoni Gaudí used a structure clearly comparable to a cable-stayed bicycle wheel in La Pedrera, around 1906. Even today, in the building’s basement, this exemplary structural solution can be observed, far ahead of its time and of extraordinary conceptual clarity.
The transition from the roof of the original Camp Nou main stand to the new cable-stayed roof thus synthesises more than one hundred years of architectural and structural evolution. From concrete to steel, from the classical stand to the structural lightness of a large-scale bicycle wheel, a transformation that shows how stadium architecture continues to be a privileged field for understanding the relationship between technique, space, and collective emotion.
