It all feels a long way from Hollywood.
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.
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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. But what it lacks in modern facilities it makes up for in character, particularly in an era when so many top-flight clubs play in identikit grounds.
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; while the largest stand, the Holmesdale Road End, which looms over the rest of the ground, is also the most modern. It was built in 1995.
The ground may be dilapidated — and, with a capacity of just 25,486, cramped by Premier League standards — but its atmosphere and locale, in an area which has stubbornly resisted gentrification, are what attracted the makers of Ted Lasso to use it as Nelson Road, the home of AFC Richmond.
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