The Financial Times reports that the unfashionable premiership football team Portsmouth has signed up one of the world's trendiest architectural firms to design them a new stadium.
The firm is Herzog and de Meuron - the Swiss-based practice behind Tate Modern and the Beijing Olympic Stadium for next year's games.
According to the FT, the move "underlines the game's growing sophistication as a business awash with cash seeks to satisfy an increasingly demanding and middle-class fan base."
The FT publishes artists' impressions of Herzog and de Meuron's impressive-looking designs for a new Portsmouth ground on the city's docks. It shows the new stadium surrounded by an undulating ring of glass-fronted flats shimmering by the water. The design would humble all the other tinny football grounds in Britain, which as the FT notes tend to be designed by "engineers and box-ticking specialist firms."
The FT likes what it sees. "Portsmouth's decision is a brave and prescient one, which will lift the club and the city, and its effects should ripple through a culture of football that has eschewed architecture to is own detriment."
It will also help to regenerate the rundown docks and avoid the need for a new stadium on a greenfield site, the paper argues.
What will Portsmouth-basher Boris Johnson think?
* This is an extract from the Wrap, Guardian Unlimited's digest of the daily papers. Try it free.
