On December 17, 2024, heavy news came from Nanjing: the stadium at the Youth Olympic Sports Park will undergo a radical transformation. The modern stadium, once built to Olympic standards, will be transformed into a professional soccer stadium with flexible switching functions.
This upcoming professional soccer stadium will have 50,000 seats, marking the first time Nanjing has had a venue for a top soccer event of this size. Top soccer events such as the Chinese Super League and even the Asian Cup are expected to be staged here.
Despite the advanced facilities of the Youth Olympic Sports Park Stadium, its multifunctional potential has not yet been fully unleashed due to its 18,000-seat capacity. The remodeling is designed to break this bottleneck and enhance the venue's breadth of application and level of service. It is reported that the park already has 3 soccer training fields and 11 natural turf training fields, providing unique conditions for the renovation. The remodeled venues will welcome the cheers of 50,000 spectators.
It is worth mentioning that the renovation project will also make smart use of the existing functional houses, such as VIP rooms and athletes' lounges, to be temporarily transformed into tennis competition venues. The sunken grandstand space, which will be modularized, can be flexibly combined into about 12,000 spectator seats for tennis finals or 8,000 spectator seats for tennis semi-finals.
Looking to the future, the stadium's grandstand will have remarkable flexibility. It will be a solid stage for professional soccer, but also be revitalized for tennis, switching at any time to meet the needs of different sports.
