Thursday, 6 April 2023

Why Selhurst Park is used for US tv series

The Athletic explains why what they call a ‘dilapidated’ Selhurst Park was used as the setting for a popular tv series.

'Nestled between a petrol station, a supermarket and rows of terraced houses in one of the more deprived corners of London, Selhurst Park – the home of Crystal Palace Football Club – is an unlikely setting for one of America’s most popular television shows.

Yet when the makers of Ted Lasso, the Apple TV series about a fish-out-of-water soccer coach, were wondering which stadium to use as the home ground for the fictional AFC Richmond, an underdog club valiantly scrapping against English football’s elite, they could hardly have chosen a better spot.

Selhurst Park is what its supporters would call a ‘proper football stadium’. Its critics — and particularly visiting supporters whose view of their side is almost certainly going to be blocked by a TV gantry, a pillar, or possibly both — would be less generous.

One side of the stadium, the Main Stand, is as old as the ground itself, which celebrates its 100th birthday next year; its opposite number, the Arthur Wait Stand, was considered state-of-the-art when it opened in the 1960s; one end, the Whitehorse Lane Stand, is backed onto by a Sainsbury’s supermarket

You do not queue to enter Stamford Bridge with the smell of jerk chicken wafting across a turnstile stationed opposite a second-hand car dealership.  Given Palace have yet to win a major trophy in their 117-year history, glory-hunters have come to the wrong place.'

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