The notebook
Part of the complete Subbuteo guide
A Subbuteo stadium was never sold as one object. It arrived in instalments. The Stadium Grandstand, reference C140, was introduced in 1976 at £2.95, moulded in green and tan and supplied with five spectator figures. Stadium Terracing, C142, followed in 1977: two units with supports, to add to the grandstand you already owned. And then, the same year, came the piece with the least glamour and the most consequence — C143, the Stadium Terracing Corner Unit, sold with the plainest promise in the whole catalogue: to enable you to complete your stadium.
Read that order again, because it is the whole argument of this article. A stadium is not a stand. A stadium is an enclosure. A grandstand down one touchline is a model of a stand with a football game in front of it. The moment the terracing turns the corner and the ring closes, something changes that has nothing to do with how much card you own: the table stops being furniture and becomes a room with a pitch at the bottom of it.
We know this the hard way, because we built one. The 3D stadium that surrounds the pitch in our game is a closed bowl, and the first version of it was a monster: 2.08 million triangles, measured off the renderer rather than guessed. Cutting it to 414,000 taught us a lot about seats and crowds. But the thing that actually made it look like a stadium was not the polygon budget. It was closing the corners.
Put a single stand along one side of your pitch and photograph it from the opposite touchline. It looks great. Now photograph it from the end, along the goal line, which is where you actually sit when you play. The stand disappears edge-on and you are looking at a tablecloth.
This is the difference between scenery and architecture. Scenery works from one angle; architecture works from all of them, because it encloses a volume. Every ground you have ever loved does one thing first: it tells you where the world ends. The stands are the wall of the room. The pitch is the floor.
Which is why the corner unit is not an accessory to the grandstand — it is the point of the grandstand. The corner is where two straight runs stop being two straight runs and start being one continuous thing. In our 3D bowl the corners are a rounded rectangle with a fixed corner radius, not a mitre joint, because a sharp 90-degree corner reads as a box and a curved one reads as a stadium. That single parameter changed more than any texture we painted.
The catalogue history is worth laying out, because it is a five-year lesson in what a ground is made of.
Notice what that sequence is doing. Seating, then more seating, then the corner, then the scoreboard, then light, then a crowd cheap enough to buy in bulk, then the boards at the pitch edge. It is exactly the order in which a real ground grows, and it is exactly the order in which a table becomes convincing. Nobody planned it as a philosophy. It just turns out that when you sell people a ground in instalments, they buy the enclosure first.
It is also, commercially, the same trick as the numbered team boxes we wrote about in subbuteo teams: the game is finished, the world around it never is. And it is one of the reasons the English version of this game travelled better than its cousins abroad, which we mapped in one game, five countries.
When you model a stand in software you cannot hide behind a nice photograph, because the camera goes everywhere. You are forced to decide the actual geometry, and those decisions transfer straight back to cardboard.
The performance lesson is worth repeating for anyone modelling one themselves: our triangle count fell by a factor of five, from 2.08 million to 414,000, mostly by making each spectator dumber rather than by having fewer of them. Draw calls, not triangles, turned out to be the real bottleneck. A stand is a crowd problem, not a geometry problem.
Once the ring is closed, three accessories do a disproportionate amount of work, and all three are about information rather than architecture.
Floodlights tell you what time it is. A pylon at each corner turns an afternoon kickabout on a table into a midweek fixture under the lights, which is why the mains adaptor existed at all: four pylons, one plug, and a room you had to turn the lights off in. The scoreboard tells you the match has a state — it happened, it is being recorded, it will end with a result. The perimeter boards tell you where the pitch stops, which is the same job the corner unit does one level up.
If you are building from scratch and can only make one, make the boards. They are a strip of card two centimetres high, they take an evening, and they draw a hard line around the playing surface that immediately makes everything inside it look intentional.
You do not need the original moulded units, and second-hand ones are increasingly expensive for what they are. A convincing ground can be built from foamboard, card and paint, and it takes a Saturday.
And a last piece of advice from having done it in both media: build the stadium after you have played a hundred games, not before. You will know where you sit, where your hand goes, and which side you never look at — and you will build the ground around the way you actually play. Speaking of which, the way you play is mostly the base and the flick, which we pulled apart in the physics of the flick.
The Stadium Grandstand, reference C140, introduced in 1976 at £2.95. It was moulded in green and tan and came with five spectator figures. Terracing and the corner unit followed in 1977.
Build the ring around your pitch with a clear margin all the way round, so your hands never touch the stands while you play. The height matters less than the slope: about thirty degrees, or roughly three units of rise for every five of depth.
Usually three reasons: the corners are open, the terrace is too steep, and every seat is occupied. Close the ring, flatten the rake and leave about a quarter of the seats empty.
The brown terracing and corner units from 1977 and the original green and tan grandstand are the ones people look for, and the later grey and red-white-blue reissues from 1988 are easier to find. Boxes, as ever, are most of the value.
Not every kitchen table fits a closed bowl, and not every household will tolerate one being left up. If you want the enclosure without the storage problem, Toy Soccer Cup puts a full stadium around every match — a continuous ring of terracing, a crowd that stands up when your team scores, and floodlights that do not need a mains adaptor. It is free in your browser, with nothing to install.
Then build the card one anyway. Ours renders in milliseconds and yours will still be better, because yours will have a corner you cut yourself.
Two different kinds of fact are mixed in this article, and it is worth separating them.
The catalogue history — references, years and prices — is documented here:
The 3D figures — 2.08 million triangles cut to 414,000, the 0.52 by 0.30 terrace step, ten rows, a quarter of the seats left empty, the hundred-odd segments around the perimeter — are not from anywhere. They are measurements off our own renderer while building the stadium in Toy Soccer Cup, and you can check the result by opening the game. If a number here does not match what you see, tell me.
