Original subtitles

[narrator] In the UK,

engineers are taking on a seemingly

impossible challenge.

It'll be a massive feat of engineering.

They're constructing a billion-dollar stadium

on water.

It's probably not the best place to build anything,

let alone a stadium.

This flat-pack design will rise in record time.

Built from pieces made all over the country

to hit a deadline set in stone.

[Colin] We're playing Premier League football.

We can't afford to miss it. We have to hit that date.

The team needs to build in a bomb-strewn site...

[rumbling]

Drilling a pile through something like that would be

game over, really.

...dodge fragile historic structures

and battle wild waterfront winds.

-[radio beeps] -[worker] Keep going, keep going, keep going.

You're so close.

[Alex] The last thing we want is

falling bolts or falling plates.

This incredible stadium

ranks in a league of ambitious new engineering wonders

that are bigger, faster, taller, and more advanced

than anything ever constructed before.

This is the inside story of the extraordinary challenge

of building these giants.

Liverpool, England.

This city is famous worldwide for two things...

[screaming]

...it's the hometown of The Beatles.

And the city's half a million inhabitants are football crazy.

Everton is the city's oldest football club.

The team's stadium, Goodison Park, is a short walk

from Liverpool's famous River Mersey.

In 1892, Goodison became

the first custom-built football stadium in the country.

The thousands of workers from the bustling docks were

the first supporters to pack the stands here.

And establish a loyal fan base that's remained strong

for over 130 years.

Alix Waldron works for the club,

and she comes from a family of Everton fans.

The Park End, row FF, is the seats where I've been

coming for years and years with my family.

I essentially grew up here, coming sort of week in,

week out with my dad and my uncles,

my brother when he was born, and, you know,

it holds so many special memories

and, you know, that family unit that it feels like here.

Goodison Park is precious to the 39,000 fans

that come to every game.

But the old ground is worn and run-down.

There are another 34,000 people on a waiting list for tickets.

Everton Football Club's solution is to build

an ambitious brand-new stadium

that boosts capacity by a third.

The club has turned to world-renowned architect

and stadium expert

Dan Meis.

He's designed ground-breaking sports arenas

from America to Japan.

When I first met with the club,

the brief actually was very clear.

Build a modern football stadium,

but keep that intensity of Goodison.

This is Dan's revolutionary design.

This spectacular venue will

seat more than 52,000 roaring fans

in the UK's steepest terraces to create a wall of sound.

Above the stands, 4,400 tons of structural steel support

a 300,000 square-foot roof capping this sporting cauldron.

Around the outside,

sweeping aluminum cladding

sits above an imposing brick facade

that blends traditional with modern

to reflect its historic Liverpool home.

Finding a site for a new stadium in Liverpool

is a big challenge.

The city is crowded.

There are few areas ripe for redevelopment close

to Everton's spiritual home by the Liverpool docks.

Historically, a lot of the, you know,

the people who work down on the dockyards,

they tend -- you know, they'd be football fans,

they'd be going to Everton matches,

they'd be leaving work here and walking up to Goodison Park

to support the team.

Club director Colin Chong has led the search

for the club's new home for three years.

He and the team have secured a 21-acre riverside plot

called Bramley-Moore Dock.

For a project as big as a stadium,

there weren't really that many sites.

We kept coming back to Bramley-Moore Dock.

Unfortunately, the dock was predominantly water.

Bramley-Moore Dock has been out of use for 40 years.

It's roughly stadium-sized,

but it's submerged under 26 feet of water.

When I had a conversation with the old chairman,

bless his soul, I did explain to him that where we chose to

build the stadium was probably not the best place to build

anything, let alone a stadium.

The team faces a minefield of engineering challenges.

The dock is enclosed by 170-year-old stone walls.

A thick bed of soft silt sits below the water.

The perimeter is dotted with fragile original dock features

and an historic brick tower

that are all protected by preservation orders.

It's probably the worst site

that we could have picked to build on

but it'll be a real unique design.

It's a massive feat of engineering

to look at how do we do this?

The first challenge the team faces is how to turn

this water-filled site

into a solid foundation.

This is how they'll solve it.

First, a boat combs the dock to remove debris.

Next, the team fills the dock

with nearly 16 million cubic feet of sand.

Compactors pound the sand 60 times per minute

with 10-ton hammers.

Then, piling rigs use augers with hollow shafts

to bore holes 52 feet down to bedrock.

The rig operators inject concrete as the augers retract

to prevent the bore holes from collapsing.

Finally, workers push steel reinforcement cages

into the wet concrete before it sets

to create a forest of foundation piles

for the team to build on.

August, 2021.

The stadium team begins raking the bottom of the dock

to clear away any unwanted debris

and makes a very unwelcome discovery.

[Alix] We have found a couple of ordnance devices.

A bomb. Yeah.

Divers identify a total of 12 unexploded

anti-aircraft rounds.

The German Air Force dropped thousands of tons of bombs

on Liverpool in World War II.

Some of the bombs and anti-aircraft shells

failed to detonate,

and they are trapped in the dock's silt.

It's a real danger that a machine on site

could disturb one of these unexploded munitions.

The team evacuates the dock area.

Drilling a pile through something like that would be

game over, really, so it has to happen to make sure that,

you know, it's safe for people

to carry on with the next phases.

Engineers in Liverpool, England

are building a brand-new super stadium

for the Everton Football Club.

An explosive ordnance disposal unit removes the larger devices

to be dismantled off-site

and explodes the smaller devices

next to the dock.

With the danger now handled,

the engineers restart their work.

They need to empty the dock of water.

But simply draining it will allow the massive weight

of the River Mersey to collapse the 170-year-old dock wall,

turning the dock into part of the river.

To solve this problem, the engineers devise

an ingenious solution.

They bring in a special dredger.

It scoops up hundreds of tons of sand from

the mouth of the River Mersey.

The dredger mixes the sand with river water to make a slurry.

It pumps this along a reinforced pipe

directly into the dock.

The sand in the slurry sinks to the bottom of the dock

and displaces the water.

Pumps then drain this water into the river.

The dock itself is never empty at any stage.

And then, eventually, the water will be

completely removed and the sand

becomes a solid mass of material.

After eight weeks of pumping, a giant expanse of sand

emerges from the water.

Two weeks later, the dock is almost completely full.

Giant compactors hammer down the 43,000 square feet of sand.

This makes the dock solid enough

to start foundation piling.

Pile drivers begin drilling down

to the compacted sand and into bedrock.

The hollow drills fill the 24-inch-wide holes

with concrete as they pull up and out of the ground.

Crane teams then insert cages made from steel

to reinforce the concrete.

[worker] Hey, hey, hey, hey!

Seven months and 2,700 piles later,

the stadium team has a solid base to build on.

[worker] Keep going, keep going, keep going.

Now begins the task of constructing

the stadium's concrete skeleton.

[worker] Hold off that.

There's another one in.

It takes the team 10 months to turn a water-filled dock

into a dry and stable foundation.

The next challenge is to build the concrete walls,

floor, and stairs of the stadium.

Now that the crews are working above ground,

they need to factor in the wind.

It's one of the windiest places

and one of the windiest cities in the UK.

So the weather conditions that we're exposed to here

call for a different way,

different methodology of building.

Add to that a deadline of three years

to complete the project,

the team needs a faster way to build with concrete.

The solution is to build the stadium in parts

in a workshop and ship these to the site.

[Colin] Whilst we're actually filling the dock in, carrying out some

of the piled foundations and some of the existing

hardscape, we're manufacturing product off-site.

So as soon as those foundations are ready

to receive a wall, the wall will be in.

This huge factory, 100 miles away in Worksop,

has the task of manufacturing the 30,000 tons of concrete

components that form the Everton Stadium.

400 workers operate giant rigs that produce building

components in hours instead of days.

The computer-controlled machines pour concrete

into a flat mold.

And once it's dry, turn it over

and place it into another mold.

This produces pristine-looking sections of wall that require

no extra finishing when they get to the site.

Everything made inside the factory must fit perfectly.

When a component leaves the assembly line,

there will be no chance for any adjustments.

The team's solution is to give everyone access

to a 3D computer model of the stadium.

There are no paper plans.

The stadium's model directly links with the automated

assembly lines at sites like this one.

Architect Jon-Scott Kohli

runs a digital version of the build process.

This is a master plan for all crews working on the project.

Spending the time of thinking through all of the problems

and, you know, building a sort of a 3D model a bit like this,

where process of getting information to the right people

at the right time so that you can go fast.

At the build site, the workers take delivery of

the first batch of concrete panels to make the core

structures at each corner of the stadium.

The panels arrive on the back of a low-loader.

Workers use a mobile crane to lift each panel

to the installation site.

-[radio beeps] [worker] Hold her there.

The crane operator carefully installs the panels.

[worker speaks indistinctly]

So that the steel attaches to the foundation's threads.

Workers then fill the void inside each panel with concrete

to lock it in place.

The crew repeats this process at each corner of the stadium.

[Alix] The prefab element does allow us to speed up the program.

You know, it does happen quite rapidly before you rise.

You know, you think, "Oh, we're starting that next week,"

and all of a sudden, you know, you're 30% there,

and you think, "That's just flown by."

The stadium's staircases are some of the most challenging

components to install.

Stairs are a critical part of the stadium structure.

They must be large enough and tough enough to support

the tens of thousands of fans

as they make their way to and from their seats.

This is a major test of the pre-built method.

The stairs span multiple levels and have anchor points at both

ends that connect perfectly.

Every element that's going to go to the precast concrete

factory needs to be in the model and needs to be

the right size, the right shape,

it's got to have the right holes in it.

The opening that's formed in the factory has to be

the correct size at the first time.

-[radio beeps] -[worker] Winch up slowly again.

The crane crew needs to raise the 26-foot-long staircase

at just the right angle.

Because when the crane operator

lowers it into the open building,

it must slot between the existing walls

and floor edges without taking any hits.

[worker] Hold off that.

One foot to go. Keep coming down.

The staircase holes must land precisely

on the reinforcement steel.

Hold off that.

There's no room for error.

Engineers in Liverpool are building a brand new stadium

for the Everton Football Club.

-[radio beeps] -[worker] Winch up slowly again.

The crane crew needs to raise the 26-foot-long staircase

at just the right angle.

The staircase holes must land precisely

on the reinforcement steel.

Hold it there.

It fits.

[worker] So, yeah, we're good then.

The crew releases the crane ties and the structure takes

another big step forward.

Just a few months after finishing the foundations,

the multi-level structure is rising up

at each corner of the stadium.

The concrete stair blocks mark out the scale of the site.

Now the engineers must build the four giant stands

in between them.

The concrete facility in Worksop

is producing a steady stream

of prefabricated panels.

But it's now that the team must begin to install

the stadium's steel components.

Typically, we see stadium designs either being built

where the main superstructure, you know,

the structure above ground, is either done in steel

or it's done in concrete.

But here we're doing both.

Trucks deliver large steel beams,

and crane teams lift them to the north and south sides

of the stadium.

[Jon-Scott] The benefit of using both systems is that we're then able

to use even more factories, which allows more

of the stadium to be built kind of at once

and then brought to site and directed quickly.

The steel crews swing into action.

They bolt together the huge steel elements to assemble

the framework that will support the stadium's four stands.

Crews on the east and west sides continue to slot together

prefabricated concrete to join up the four corners.

All these kind of concrete and steel elements are coming

to site and being kind of bolted together

or slotted into place.

It's good for the soul, I have to say,

to be able to kind of see a building like this

growing out of the dock so quickly.

14 months into the build, construction crews

have completed the structure's footprint.

And this 52,000-seater stadium is on the rise.

Steel columns support the roof on three sides of the original

stadium and obstruct the view of the game

for more than half of the spectators.

Every seat in the new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock must have

an unobstructed view of the pitch.

The roof covers 300,000 square feet.

It needs a huge framework to hold it up.

Across the North and the South stand, we've got these really,

really big trusses that span from one side to the other.

The longest of these spans is about 170 meters.

The tallest of them is about 11 meters high.

I mean, that's -- that's taller than my house, right?

So if you can imagine a residential street,

you know, that is what the scale of those trusses are.

Each of the five spans weighs 220 tons.

They're too large and heavy to lift in one pass.

So the team must use a special technique to lift them

separately in stages.

An off-site factory delivers dozens of beams and columns.

And steelworkers bolt them into giant frames

one third of the trusses' length.

A crawler crane lifts the first 230-foot-long section

and lowers it onto a temporary support tower.

Then, workers lift and bolt the next section

onto the first.

When the entire framework is up and connected,

the crew lowers the support towers,

and the trusses finally hold their own weight,

settling by 17 inches

to finish in precisely the right shape.

This huge steel fabrication plant, 31 miles away

from the stadium, builds the trusses.

The workers here cut, grind, and weld the huge steel

sheets, beams, and tubes

into millimeter-precise structural elements.

It falls to design engineer Alex Heaton to supervise

the installation of these massive steel structures.

The huge size of the roof truss means that his team must

send it to the site one piece at a time.

Alex will spend the next eight months at the stadium site

to oversee and coordinate every aspect

of this monster roof build.

When the trusses start arriving, I'll be putting

the pieces for the trusses on the pitch right near

the container temporary works that we're using

to assemble it.

Low loaders deliver the truss sections.

A crane lifts them to

the center of the stadium, where the pitch will be,

and the steel team assembles them.

The sections are so enormous that the steel team needs

to assemble them, propped up against a row

of giant shipping containers, stacked two units high.

[Jon-Scott] When you suddenly start seeing those being erected against

stacks of shipping containers as if they were Duplo blocks,

then you really begin to understand

the, kind of, the scale of what

we're actually -- what we're actually building here.

Alex checks the angle of deflection

across every truss section.

The piece is 30 meters long.

If this is only, you know, an 0.1 degree out,

that's a long distance over a 30-meter distance,

so it won't join up at the end.

Alex also keeps one eye on the weather forecast.

A wind speed above 23 feet per second could make the truss

swing dangerously during the lift.

We always ensure we pick calm days when we're doing these

lifts, especially the big 70-meter-long ones,

because once you pick something up, you never really want to

have to put it back down again.

When the first calm day arrives,

the crawler crane makes the lift,

and workers with guide ropes carefully walk the first huge

truss section into position.

Steelworkers bolt one end in place, and they fix the other

to a support tower.

The first lift is a success.

Over five months, the team

lifts, guides, and installs the remaining

14 truss sections to complete the roof's support structure.

Alex and the steel team inch down the jacks

on each tower and turn.

The trusses support their own weight for the first time.

And because the team overestimated the number of

days canceled due to wind, Alex can sign off on the lift

operation ahead of schedule.

It was a really good feeling to know

that it's all been finished.

And we're on program,

if not a good few weeks ahead of program.

So God must be an Everton fan, yeah.

The stadium's outline is visible for the first time.

Now the team needs to turn this skeleton

into a fully-fledged sports arena.

In Liverpool, England, engineers are racing

to raise a brand-new stadium for the Everton Football Club.

Architect Dan Meis designs the new arena to blend with

the industrial heritage of the surrounding structures,

like the famous Titanic building

and the tobacco warehouse.

It was very clear to me that this building needed

a sense of history.

It needed the kind of gravity

that a brick building would deliver.

The design encases the stadium in a nearly 60-foot high facade

made up of slender, stand-alone brick piers.

This choice presents a challenge to the engineers

building the stadium.

It would take an army of bricklayers months

to lay 243 courses of bricks in a simple wall

around the stadium.

Laying bricks in short stretches to create the narrow,

perfectly straight piers by hand

would be near impossible.

The team needs a way to lay real bricks,

but with machine-like accuracy and speed.

Their off-site construction factory has

a game-changing solution.

Handmade bricks are cut into half a million thin slices

called brick slips,

each one with a special profile cut into its back.

The factory team follows a preset plan

to lay down each brick

into large, flat molds.

Computer-controlled machinery places a steel reinforcement

cage on top

and fills the mold with concrete

to make one solid panel.

Trucks deliver the panels exactly when needed,

and crane crews bolt them into place

to cover the stadium facade in a fraction of the time

compared to traditional bricklaying.

For 18 months in Worksop, the pre-build team dedicates

one section of the cavernous facility to placing

crate after crate of brick slips.

The key profile on the back of the bricks bonds with

the concrete that automated hoppers pour into each mold.

The first brick panels begin arriving on site,

millimeter-accurate and ready for installation.

So to get that perfect by hand

would have been near on impossible, I think.

So to be able to do stuff like this in factory settings,

it's far safer for people and there's a lot less wastage

for us as well.

The crane crews must handle the panels with care.

The shallow brick slips are more fragile than concrete.

One knock could cause enough damage to render

the entire panel unusable.

Making a replacement will cost time and money.

The design team has a solution.

Special threaded inserts allow the crane team to screw hook

attachments straight into the concrete.

This means no slings or hooks can bump the panel's bricks

as the team lifts it.

It takes the crane team just two-and-a-half hours to install

the first panels after they arrive on site.

Every panel the crew fixes to the outside of the structure

makes the stadium look more like an enclosed building.

On the inside, construction crews start to fit

partition walls and cover over the gaps between the different

parts of the stadium structure.

This sort of paneling has got a small air gap underneath

there between the different elements of the build,

the steel and the concrete.

And it just allows for the way they expand and contract

with the different weather conditions.

The stadium is a series of freestanding structures built

from either concrete or steel.

The flexible rubber strips like this cover gaps and allow

the different sections to expand and contract.

[Alix] There are multiple movement joints around the build,

and fans will just walk straight past it and not

realize the kind of engineering

design that's gone into the finish there.

On the outside, black expansion panels between

the brick sections allow a similar degree of movement.

After 10 months of work, the crane team installs

the last of 745 panels to complete the brick facade.

Architect Dan Meis visits to

see how his vision is taking shape.

It's easy for me to draw some lines and put some red color

on it and say, "It's going to be a giant brick wall."

Then trying to figure out exactly how that gets built

and how it gets built in the sequence of construction,

that's all a very complex thing.

But seeing them in place, it's really incredible.

The brick pier facade echoes the industrial heritage of

Liverpool's docks perfectly.

Now the engineers need to focus on the experience

inside the stadium.

Engineers in Liverpool are building a huge new stadium for

the Everton Football Club.

The stadium's designers want to recreate

the electric atmosphere

of the club's old site, Goodison Park.

The bits that everybody loves about Goodison are what we want

to bring to Bramley-Moore,

about recreating our fortress that is Goodison and making it

a really intimidating place for the away team to come.

The designer's solution is to make the stands the steepest

of any stadium in the country.

To do that, the rise of the steps must increase

the higher they get.

You can just sort of perceive that kind of gentle curve as

you get steeper and steeper up the stadium stand,

by the time you get up to the back of the tier,

you've got quite a big step.

And so the angle at that point

is the steepest part of the whole stadium.

So we've sort of maxed out the regulations in order to

kind of create that particularly imposing atmosphere.

The crews build the terraces from thousands of differently

sized prefabricated concrete components.

They must install each one into its correct place.

It's painstaking work

that takes the team 12 months to complete.

Next, an army of seat fitters descends on the stands

and installs the stadium's 52,000 seats.

The steep, curved stands and the seating close to

the pitch is a key step to creating the intense atmosphere

the fans crave.

The steepness element formed a big part of the design around

creating that fortress.

You can see it from the front row when you look up.

It certainly feels steep from down here, and I'm sure

it's not for the faint-hearted to be on that back row.

But yeah, there's no bad seat in the house,

so anywhere anyone sits in the ground,

they've got a great view of the game.

The stadium's architect, Dan Meis, builds in another

feature to maintain its pressure-cooker atmosphere.

[Dan] What we had talked about from the very beginning

was this cauldron of energy.

So we knew that we needed to keep the roof as tight as

we could on top of the stands that were right on top of

the pitch, because that was going to keep all the sound

in the building.

Dan designs the stadium's roof as a giant curve that reflects

the sounds the fans make back onto the stands.

The design consists of 872 perforated panels

that vary in angle across the structure.

To install them, the construction crew must use

a special crane attachment.

On the end of the crane hook,

the team will hang a long steel beam

with a posable hydraulic mount that clamps onto anchors points

on the cladding panel

and tilts it to its final orientation.

At the opposite end, a sliding counterweight runs

along tracks on the beam.

It balances the load and allows the crew to install each panel

in a single controlled lift.

Driven by this mechanism, the crane repeats the same

precise motion to slot the panels into place

one after another.

The first truckloads of cladding arrive on site

just 18 months before the first game of the season.

Each large panel weighs 550 pounds.

Their flat shape makes them difficult to control

in the strong winds that buffet Liverpool's docks.

Liverpool's quite a windy city anyway, but being right down

on the kind of front face of it, you are really exposed,

so there's no perfect time for doing these lifts.

And we need to get playing in here as soon as possible.

The crane team attaches the first panel,

and adjusts it to the correct angle.

The crane begins the lift

130 feet up towards the stadium roof.

Crane slingers hold on to trailing tag lines

to prevent a collision

and help guide the panel into place.

Over the next six months, the cladding team installs

a further 871 of these panels into place using

their innovative robotic arm.

It completes the challenge just one year

before the stadium's first game.

86,000 square feet of

perforated aluminum wrap around the stadium,

ready to create the cauldron of noise for the first match.

[audience roaring]

Engineers in Liverpool are racing to complete a brand-new

soccer stadium in time for the opening game of the season.

A busy schedule means this site

will often host two games a week.

A 90-minute soccer match inflicts a lot of damage

on a natural grass field.

It's critical that the pitch recovers in time

for the next game.

Head groundsman Jon Howell has a solution.

So, this is a small intersection of what the pitch

would look like underneath.

These tough plastic fibers sit between the organic blades of

grass to knit them together.

[Jon] They reinforce the pitch on a sand-based pitch,

and then we grow the grass in and around the roots attached

to the base of the stitching, and it just holds it together.

The challenge for John and his team

is to turf and stitch more

than 75,000 square feet of playing surface.

Every stitch must be in the right place,

because a gap creates weak points.

The solution is a giant mobile stitching rig.

This machine unspools over 37,000 miles of the plastic

fiber and punches rows of it into to the ground

two inches apart.

After the automated rig is stitched the entire surface,

the organic grass grows through the fibers.

And John has a feel that looks and feels real, but is strong

enough to withstand the punishment

of an entire soccer season.

But the pitch still needs light, heat, and water

to grow quickly.

Liverpool receives plenty of rain, but light and heat

are lacking.

[Jon] New stadiums, they're all unbelievable.

But as a groundsman point of view,

they're not great for growing grass.

We're not going to get much sunlight.

We've had next to nothing in the south.

The north-south orientation of the stadium

and its overhanging roof keeps

the south end of the pitch in the shade

and several degrees cooler than the north end.

This slows grass growth dramatically.

Going into match day, we know the eyes of the world

are watching us now. It's going to be quite tight.

Time's very limited with this weather.

To solve this problem, engineers install 1,240 solar

panels on the southern edge of the stadium roof.

The electricity they generate powers 13 sun lamps to help

the grass grow quickly.

With these rigs, it's twofold. We've got pink LED lights.

I find that's the best for the pitch,

for the root developments and extra light.

And then, the infrared heaters, as they're called.

The team rotates the sun lamps to ensure every area of

the pitch gets precisely the heat and light it needs.

So the grass grows thick and strong for the opening

match of the season.

Engineers turned an unused dock into a solid foundation.

Built upwards with brick at breakneck speed and engineered

steel to create the ultimate match day experience.

To construct a unique stadium

that generations of fans will call home.

It is a legacy to the team that made it.

The stands finally begin to fill with fans

for the first game.

And this historic club begins an exciting new chapter.

I think it'll be quite emotional, actually,

to see 52,000 people in the stands.

Going to be amazing!