What AI thinks Derby County's stadium Pride Park will look like in the year 2050 | OneFootball

Derby County have been at Pride Park since 1997, so we asked Chat GPT what it thought the club's home could look like by the year 2050.

Derby County have called Pride Park home since 1997, when they moved in after 102 years at The Baseball Ground.

The stadium was opened by the Queen in August of that year, and has been the club's home ever since.

The Baseball Ground, though much loved, had become unsuitable for Derby's growth by the middle of the 1990s. Hemmed in on all four sides, increasing its size was more or less impossible, with safety requirements following the Hillsborough disaster limiting its capacity to just 18,300 for the all-seater age.

On top of this, the ground was below street level, and this had another unwanted effect, that any rain water that landed on the pitch simply wouldn't drain off it. This led to the Baseball Ground having a pitch that was infamously bad, often turning into a mudbath as summer turned to autumn and staying that way throughout the winter months.

Pride Park was the club's decisive move towards rebuilding for the Premier League era.

With a capacity of 33,597 and having cost £28 million to build, it was a home fit for the 21st century. But now we're a quarter of the way into that new century, so what might the stadium look like in another 25 years? FLW has asked the AI chatbot, ChatGPT, what Pride Park could look like in a quarter of a century's time.

AI predicts that sustainability and innovation will be key to any redevelopment of Pride Park

Derby unveiled plans to redevelop Pride Park and increase its capacity to 44,000 during the 2006/07 season, though these plans were scrapped in 2008 with relegation from the Premier League and the sale of the club to an American consortium during their relegation season.

ChatGPT indicates that any future redevelopments will be more modest than these plans, and that, "several ongoing and proposed projects suggest a vision of a more modern, fan-centric, and sustainable venue."

Work has already been carried out to introduce safe standing there, while there are also plans in place to redesign the exterior of the East Stand concourse, which will, according to the architects involved, "provide a destination for retail, dining and drinking for both match-day spectators and usage on non-match days".

ChatGPT believes that sustainability and innovation will be at the heart of any redevelopments of the stadium, including retractable roofs made from lightweight carbon-fibre composites and polymer-composite membranes.

No mention of increasing the size of the stadium capacity is made, though this may prove necessary should the club progress on the pitch. Derby's average attendance for the 2024/25 season was 29,083, which represents 86.5% of the 33,597 capacity.

The last time they were in the Premier League, in 2007/08, they achieved an average home attendance of 32,432, or 96.5% of capacity, despite having the worst season of any club in the history of the top flight. Their record attendance is 41,826 for a match against Spurs, played at the Baseball Ground in September 1969.

Any redevelopment of Pride Park will ultimately be about increasing revenues

Match-day revenues are critical to any club looking to grow, and if Derby County are to get back to where they believe they belong, they need to maximise every financial opportunity they can.

Improving the spectator experience is critical to this, driving up the amount of money spent on match-days, while increasing the capacity of Pride Park could end up paying for itself over time through increased ticket sales.

The environmental aspect is one that the club may not even have any choice over. Sustainability is already a hot topic, and it was at the heart of the government's policies when they won the general election in 2024.

Supporters will expect traditions and the club's heritage to be honoured as the club gears up for the second quarter of the 21st century, and the club will have to maintain a balance between that and any further renovation work it carries out at Pride Park. But at least there is space there to allow it to grow, and that's more than could ever be said for the Baseball Ground.