What Were Football Terraces and Why Were They Removed?

Football stopped having standing terraces in the top two English divisions because of the Hillsborough disaster of 1989. Lord Justice Taylor's inquiry recommended all-seater stadiums, the government made seating compulsory, and the top flight had to comply from the 1994–95 season. Lower Football League grounds were given until 1999 under the original plan.

The story is more tangled than it sounds. Taylor did not say standing was unsafe in itself, and the timetable was later softened. Here is how terraces worked, what went wrong, and what replaced them. If you want the sound of the old ends, our guide to how crowds build atmosphere through chants picks up that thread.

What a football terrace was

A terrace is the standing area of a stadium, most closely linked with the UK and the Republic of Ireland. It is a series of concrete steps, with safety barriers set at intervals to limit how far people could move down the slope.

Clubs put them mostly behind the goals for a simple reason: money. Seated areas alongside the pitch were relatively expensive to build, while terraces let large numbers of people in for less. Over the 20th century they became the most popular part of the ground for younger working-class men and teenage boys.

In England terraces were most common from the 1920s to the 1980s. Fans gave many terraces nicknames, most commonly 'Spion Kop', after the Boer War battle. The earliest versions were earth banks built up with construction rubble and topped with railway sleepers; concrete steps and metal crush barriers came later. Curious what it felt like to stand there? Try our fan experience, Terrace.

Early disasters and the first safety rules

Crowd safety was a worry long before Hillsborough. The 1902 Ibrox disaster in Glasgow led to a ban on terraces supported by framework, so terraces had to be built from solid earthwork. One source gives 25 deaths and around 500 seriously injured.

In 1946, 33 people died in an overcrowded terrace crush at Burnden Park in Bolton. It was one of the clearest early warnings of what a packed standing crowd could do.

Hillsborough and the Taylor Report

On 15 April 1989, Liverpool played Nottingham Forest in an FA Cup semi-final at Sheffield Wednesday's ground. The Leppings Lane terrace was split into three pens, and the central pen filled up fastest, leading to a fatal crush. The commonly cited toll is 96 Liverpool supporters, 94 on the day and two later, with more than 750 injured. Other accounts give a slightly different figure.

The pens had a history. After fans 'taking the terrace' in the 1970s, segregation brought high fencing and pens to most English terraces, and these pens were described as a contributing factor in the disaster.

Taylor concluded that standing was not 'intrinsically unsafe'. He still recommended all-seaters at major stadiums, and argued clubs should not use the switch to push up prices or shut out people of any age or social background.

The government decision and the timetable

On 29 January 1990, Home Secretary David Waddington gave the government's response to Taylor's final report in the Commons. His message was blunt: "The clubs will be compelled to get rid of the terraces." Section 11 of the Football Spectators Act 1989 supplied the legal mechanism.

Standing was to be reduced in stages and eliminated in first and second division grounds by August 1994, and in all Football League grounds by 1999. Taylor's report held 76 recommendations, 43 of them already in the interim report. He said clubs would have to fund most of the work themselves, pointing to sponsorship and television money.

The plan then shifted. A 1992 review let second-tier clubs keep standing areas, so the strictest rule fell on the top flight, where seating became compulsory from 1994–95.

What happened to the famous terraces

Most major clubs redesigned or rebuilt. Manchester United's Stretford End and Arsenal's North Bank were demolished in 1992. Liverpool's Spion Kop and Aston Villa's Holte End were rebuilt as seated stands about two years later, so the names survived even though the standing did not.

Ipswich Town's Portman Road was the first English professional club to convert after Hillsborough, in 1992. Coventry City had gone all-seated at Highfield Road in 1981, though terracing returned at one end by 1985. Refurbishment costs made some grounds uneconomic over the following decade.

The change spread across Europe. A UEFA ban on standing areas in its competitions in the 1990s pushed clubs to remove terraces, including at the Bernabéu and the Estádio da Luz, although German clubs kept theirs for domestic games. FIFA, UEFA and CONCACAF now require all-seater stadiums for their competitions. Whether the old ends or the new bowls make better noise is a fair argument; see the stadiums with the best atmosphere.

Safe standing and what remains uncertain

Safe standing means hybrid areas where fans can stand safely behind rails or in rail seats. Borussia Dortmund's Südtribüne keeps rail seats that flip up for standing. Celtic trialled 2,000 'safe seats' in 2016–17. Scotland sits outside the seating requirement of the Football Spectators Act 1989.

Whether standing areas can return to English top-flight grounds is uncertain. The sources reviewed describe growing demand and trials, but none gave an up-to-date confirmation of the current position, so check before relying on it.

Terraces have not vanished entirely. Irish GAA and rugby grounds keep them, and Brunton Park in Carlisle is described as Britain's biggest remaining terraced ground. For the fierce ends that shaped rivalry days, see the greatest rivalries in football.