The hospitality mix decides how a ground sounds

Capacity is a revenue allocation before it is a number, and the seats that pay most are occupied by the people who sing least.

A new stadium's capacity figure is the output of a spreadsheet that assigns every square metre to a revenue category. General admission generates a certain yield per seat. Premium generates several times that, with catering attached and a corporate buyer who renews annually and does not travel to away fixtures. Given those numbers, the finance case for the building pushes relentlessly towards more premium and fewer cheap seats, and that is why the middle tier of so many recent grounds is a band of hospitality wrapped around the halfway line.

Which is exactly where the noise used to come from. Not entirely, but the acoustic character of a bowl depends on having dense, vocal, repeat-attending support distributed rather than concentrated in one corner behind a goal. Push that support to the extremities and up into the third tier, and you get a ground that is loud in one section and inert everywhere else, which is audible on every broadcast and is one reason effect-mic mixing has become such a delicate art.

The awkward part is that the premium seats are paying for the building. I am not going to argue that a club should forgo the yield out of romance. But the yield calculation is done as if atmosphere has no commercial value, and that assumption is plainly wrong. Atmosphere is a substantial part of what a broadcaster is buying, what a sponsor is activating against, and what makes a season ticket in the cheap end worth renewing.

Some clubs have started to price it in explicitly, protecting a large contiguous singing area at below-market rates and treating the cost as a marketing expense rather than a discount. That is the right accounting, and it is rare, because it requires somebody to defend an unrecovered sum in a budget meeting.

There is a second cost that nobody models. Premium buyers do not travel, so the away following at a ground built this way is proportionally larger and louder, which is a strange thing to engineer into a home fixture.

The alternative is what is now common. A superb building, an excellent view from every seat, and a home crowd that sounds like a well-attended conference.