Bangkok, Thailand

Real estate developers
design soccer fields

From now on, Tomorrow sports can be practised anywhere. Like in Thaïland, away from stadiums, away from sports halls. Soccer in cities at the bottom of blocks and “new actors” (neither clubs nor fédérations)

In Khlong Toei district, in the city center of Bangkok, imagination has designed unusual sports fields to practise soccer freely. The area has the formes and angles that fit with megalopole urban structures, far away from conventional rectangular fields. Between buildings and houses, young ones play with their own codes away from regular field sizes.

« This way of claiming ownership of the city areas create a place for new sports practises that the traditional sports world doesn’t take into account. (collectivities, clubs, federations)», says Patrick Roult, manager of the High-level Pole in Insep Paris (National sport and Performance Institute).

«In the past, we drew soccer nets on houses walls to play soccer in the streets or we put two schoolbags on the pavement to have soccer nets. There are unusual places where kids play soccer and no one has identified those places as sports fields. However, kids play in the streets, in city places after school! »

With just their imagination and their sweatshirts laying on the floor. In Bangkok and many other cities in emerging countries, we see the same situations. «Sports in the future will make people socialize more in cities, with new actors, new urbanists, new insurance companies, new social actors», says Patrick Roult. In the Thaï capital city, it is a real estate developer and an urbanism office that had the idea to convert city center areas into sports fields.