Toronto's towering temporary FIFA bleachers are perfectly safe, especially on game day, according to the builder. Before adding 17,000 seats to BMO Field for six 2026 World Cup games, the stands were used at the 2024 Paris Olympics and the Ryder Cup in New York.
New York Times report raises concerns
The New York Times was not kind to BMO Field's temporary stands, a metal scaffold topped by 17,000 new seats erected for the upcoming FIFA World Cup games in Toronto. When its local staffer attended the May 9 game there between Toronto FC and Inter Miami, he reported back under the headline: "You feel it shaking." By the end of the article, however, the stands were decreed to have great sight lines.
Builder defends safety
That's as it should be, said Jeremy Troughton, managing director of the major events division of Arena Group. Arena built the temporary stands at BMO Field, which will be briefly renamed Toronto Stadium for the duration of this summer's World Cup, which began on June 11.
"We put up grandstands and temporary structures for major events around the world," he told National Post. "My team looks after those major events and the one-offs where the level of scrutiny can be a bit higher than you might get for a normal event, and obviously, on the level of major events in terms of global TV audience, I think that the FIFA World Cup is probably number one."
He understands that the stands may look a little hodgepodge, before they were covered with World Cup branded wrapping, but said safety is paramount. "We are all about the engineering and the strength. That is what we're there to do."
Engineering for crowd dynamics
That means building the stadium to fit the event and its attendees, plus what Troughton calls "the dynamic."
"If you've got people attending a dressage event in equestrian, where the crowd generally are not even allowed to move, versus an ACDC rock concert, you've got extremes," he said. "And so part of that engineering is we look at the harmonic motion, the motion of the crowd in the grandstands, and we always engineer for what the crowd is likely to be doing."
It's like a spectrum of energy. "Synchronized crowd movement is something that will occur, so these are engineered more to the ACDC rock concert end than the dressage end."
Stands become more stable with people
He added that the stands become more stable once there are people in them.
"There's various ballast blocks and tie-down points under the stands, and that might, to the untrained eye, make you wonder how safe they are, but that's there purely to ballast when it's not loaded," he said. "When they're loaded with people, that is when they are in their most robust configuration. We become the ballast."
Materials and history
Materials for the scaffolding were sourced locally, but the seats atop have travelled around the world. "The particular stand that's in Toronto, in its lifetime, was used in the Paris Olympics, then it was moved across and did the Ryder Cup in New York, in Bethpage, and now it's up in Toronto," said Troughton.
