Pritzker is not enough: Braga Stadium and the city-branding that was not

It is well known that sports mega-events are widely used as city, even country branding tools: this is the case of UEFA EURO 2004, when Portugal – one of smaller economies of UE – built ten stadiums to receive the most important football championship in Europe. Some Portuguese cities saw the opportunity to promote expansion of urban areas or host international entertainment events; some football clubs saw it as way to update or build new stadiums, with the prospect of use them not as simple sport venue, but as multi-purpose arenas and touristic attraction, as some of its Spanish and English counterparts did: all that appetite was fueled by less demanding financial controls of late 1990’s. With that background, Sporting Club Braga, hometown glory of the homonymous city asked Eduardo Souto de Moura, then an internationally renowned architect, to design a stadium able to host final stage matches of UEFA EURO 2004, adhering strictly to federation higher standards. Souto de Moura lead a team that delivered what is praised as one of his masterworks – and one of the world’s most relevant buildings in the turn of the century, which paved the way to his author win the Pritzker Prize in 2011, maximum honor in the field of Architecture. Despite all that, shortly after the championship, the stadium started to be heavily criticized by SC Braga, its tenant and the City of Braga, its owner: do not bring as much fans as expected; it is not exactly an “indoor facility” but an open landscape feature, which made it sometimes uncomfortable to watch games in cooler periods; do not promote urbanization around it, becoming an isolated structure; and, above anything else, it was the most expensive of UEFA EURO 2004, with the start of lending payments in a strong recession period in Europe. Since then, Braga Stadium is a contentious subject: seventeen years later, city and club has tried to sell the stadium; has proposed to retrofit a smaller, older stadium in downtown to become its home, “leaving” behind the current one and, as final resort, to demolish the existing building to create space for new ventures. This paper explores the intricacies of such process: how a little developed legacy design process, according to Preuss (2008), lead to complete rejection not just of the building, but to all supposed effort to insert Braga in a global network of sports/architecture destination. It also explores the current state, where the club and city intend to build a new stadium answering the same UEFA requirements that Souto de Moura already did in 2004. The study intends to reinforce the importance of planning education for citizens, investors, and officials by detailing a case where little attention was given to long term results and implications of extraordinary investments, as is the case of sports megaevents. It also highlights the importance of collaboration and openness in planning processes that should involve large part of community as stakeholder. The study is part of author’s PhD thesis currently in development and was realized with basis on stakeholder’s interviews, academic and press files research.