A greater focus on sustainability and the technology to make temporary facilities with ever greater sophistication, comfort and practicality has made shipping container conversions an extremely popular prospect for a wide variety of uses.
Whilst the most common examples are shipping container homes and container retail parks, by far the most ambitious example of a sustainable piece of container architecture was Stadium 974 in Doha, Qatar, which was, true to its name, stored in and made out of 974 shipping containers.
It was created as part of a very unusual set of circumstances for a particularly unconventional sporting tournament and has had an afterlife that nobody saw coming.
Nothing Lasts Forever?
The 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar was an extremely controversial football tournament for a wide variety of reasons, but one of the biggest practical concerns was the sustainability of running one of the world’s largest sporting competitions in a country with a population of three million people.
Given that the 2010 World Cup in South Africa and the 2014 World Cup in Brazil had both led to the construction of several extremely expensive stadiums that were promptly abandoned, one of the biggest parts of Qatar’s bid was a stadium that would not become a white elephant.
The Qatar Stars League, the nation’s highest-tier football league, did not generate attendances that would justify the creation of eight stadiums with a capacity of over 40,000 people, with one team having a capacity of just 200.
This meant that the initial plan for Stadium 974, initially the Ras Abu Aboud Stadium, was to be a World Cup-ready stadium in a box. Technically, it was a stadium in 974 shipping containers, but the idea was that this was meant to allow nations to use sustainable solutions that could be built, used, taken down and shipped to the next tournament.
As it turned out, Stadium 974 would be used for six matches of the 2022 FIFA Arab Cup and seven matches (including one knockout game) of the 2022 World Cup, with the plan at that point to dismantle the stadium and take the containers to a storage facility in Africa.
The plan after that would have been to ship the stadium to Uruguay, home of the first-ever FIFA World Cup to serve as one of its stadiums as part of a four-country bid with Argentina, Chile and Paraguay.
However, after that bid failed and Uruguay, Chile and Argentina were given “Anniversary” matches as part of a six-country, three-continent bid with Spain, Portugal and Morocco organised under suspicious circumstances, there was no longer a need for Stadium 974 in Uruguay.
Because of this, not only has Stadium 974 remained in Qatar, but as of 2025 it is still being used.
It hosted two matches of the inaugural Fifa Intercontinental Cup, including the Derby of the Americas and the Challenger Cup in December 2024, and is set to be the host venue of the 2024 French Trophee Des Champions between Paris Saint-Germain and AS Monaco in early 2025.
Whilst unusual given that it was expected to go into storage, it is another example of how a high-quality temporary solution can inadvertently become permanent.
