1) O.co Coliseum, Oakland, California

For 25 years US sports teams have been obsessed with building stadiums that can stand as works of art. Once one wealthy sports owner has one the rest want the same thing. What has followed is the great stadium building boom until it seems every city has at least one new or rebuilt $1bn superstadium. But not every ballpark is perfect. While the wrecking ball of money may have pulled down some perfectly fine stadiums, it has left others that should have met their demise years ago.

For instance, Oakland’s Coliseum is so bad, it is the worst stadium in two sports. Built to be a football and baseball stadium it became a baseball-only park in the 1980s. It was then ruined for both football and baseball when the Raiders returned from Los Angeles demanding the construction of a garish tower of suites and stands. The result looks like a new stadium someone forgot to finish.

In the Bay area the new structure became known as Mt Davis, named after the Raiders eccentric owner Al Davis. It also took away whatever little charm Oakland’s stadium once had. Before Mt Davis, the stadium was a perfect semi-circle with open views to the Berkley Hills. You could freeze on summer nights as the wind whipped through the Coliseum’s concrete concourses but at least enjoy the sunset reflecting off the distant hillsides. Once Mt Davis went up it was like someone had built an apartment building in the outfield.

Even before Mt Davis, the Coliseum was fading. As every other city destroyed their dated, crumbling multi-purpose stadiums that seemed to serve no purpose, Oakland was forced to hold on to the Coliseum. Maybe in a way the city should be celebrated for not caving to sports teams who insisted upon cash-gushing palaces built at public expense. Oakland didn’t have the money to capitulate the way other places did. As the years went on, the stadium only got worse.

Now it is home to strange odors. Rainwater puddles on the field and backs up in hallways. The baseball field is ruined by football even as football hates trying to run plays on the dirt of the baseball diamond. It’s too big a stadium for baseball and so the seats in the upper deck and on Mt Davis are covered in green tarps. It has become too large for football as well, especially with the constant threat that the Raiders will soon move again, leaving an empty Mt Davis to blight baseball games for eternity.

2) RFK Stadium, Washington DC

RFK Stadium in 2002, before the rust and must descended. Photograph: Lawrence Jackson/AP

There are so many reasons RFK should not be on a worst stadiums list. For more than three decades it had a wonderful run as the home of Washington’s NFL team. Tiny by pro football standards, RFK had a fantastic intimacy where fans felt close to the field and many of the seating sections actually bounced at particularly loud moments.

The problem with RFK is that those three decades were two decades ago. Still used as the home of MLS’s DC United, the stadium looks as if it could have been abandoned 25 years ago. Paint peels off the facades, gates are rusty and concourses have a musty smell that never goes away. In the lone major US city without a state to support it, money is tight. And after Washington gave more than $670m to Major League Baseball to build a stadium for the then Montreal Expos in 2005, there wasn’t much left to RFK up to date.

What’s unfortunate about RFK’s current condition is that unlike almost any other stadium in America it actually had a proud and moral purpose. Built in 1961 by the DC Armory Board and the Department of Interior, the venue then known as DC Stadium was supposed to house baseball’s Senators and the local NFL team. The football club was then owned by George Preston Marshall who refused to employ African American players even after the rest of the NFL had long integrated. Before Marshall could move his team into the stadium, Stewart Udall the US secretary of the interior at the time stopped him. Because the new stadium was on federal land, Udall said, the team would have to add black players if it wanted to play there. Grudgingly, Marshall did and thus a stadium actually forced racial integration.

It is interesting to note that almost nothing good has happened to Washington’s NFL team since it left RFK in 1996. Sadly, little good has happened to RFK as well. The Expos, who became the Nationals, played at RFK in their first three seasons in Washington and some modest renovations were made. But mostly the proud, once-beautiful stadium with its round, wave-shaped roof crawls toward an inglorious death.

3) FedEx Field, Landover, Maryland

FedEx Field and its slowly fading upper deck. Photograph: Brad Mills/USA Today Sports

It should have been obvious from the start that this stadium was going to be a dismal failure. It took barely more than a year to build. No big sports stadium should go up this fast. Not if it is going to be a quality piece of work. But quality is a word that will never be used when talking about FedEx Field. With its exposed girders and lack of character, the stadium looks like the construction workers left on a break and never came back.

Even the parking lots look cheap, with what appears to be asphalt splashed across undulating mounds of fill. At nearly every other professional sports stadium in the US fans walk over flat parking lots to get to the game. Some of FedEx’s lots would be better used for sledding in the snow. If the stadium had any appeal when Washington owner Jack Kent Cooke opened it in 1997 as an 80,000-seat facility named for himself, that appeal was instantly destroyed by current owner Daniel Snyder who bought the team in 1999.

Snyder did everything he could to make the stadium a money machine, from selling the naming rights to FedEx to eventually slapping in 11,000 more seats that made the inner bowl of the stadium look like a pit of burgundy and gold. As his franchise tumbled into greater dysfunction more and more of those seats sat empty, serving as weekly referendums of Snyder’s ownership.

In 2010, FedEx underwent the first of many seat-reductions, presumably due to match diminishing ticket sales. Pieces of the upper deck have been hacked away until the 91,000-seat stadium had shriveled to 73,000.

At this rate, the entire upper deck may be gone by 2020. But hopefully by then FedEx will be gone too. Maybe the empty field that replaces it will have real grass and not the sea of green-painted sand that ruined the last bit of hope Washington’s football team had.

4) Busch Stadium, St Louis, Missouri

Fans wait in long lines to go through metal detectors before a game between the Milwaukee Brewers and the St Louis Cardinals at Busch Stadium. Photograph: Jeff Curry/Getty Images

The newest of three Cardinals baseball stadiums called Busch is not the worst in sports. It’s not even the worst in baseball. But it makes this list because it is the worst of the new stadiums in baseball and given the passion St Louis has for baseball and the sometimes overzealous pride of its fans best summed up by the Washington Post’s James Wagner, you would think St Louis would have built something spectacular.

Instead, they built something that is OK.

The Cardinals had a chance to be innovative. But instead of building this or this or this, they built a ballpark with a view of this parking garage.

St Louis could have done worse. They could have installed artificial turf as it did in the 1970s in the second Busch Stadium, which stood next door. And even with the parking garage in center field there are still decent glimpses of the Gateway Arch. But the old Busch Stadium was easily the nicest of the round multi-purpose stadiums of its time and after football left old Busch for good in the mid 1990s it was remodeled beautifully as a baseball stadium.

One would have thought the new Busch would be as nice as all the other new stadiums of its time but it feels cheaply done from the stairwells to concourses to the pressbox, which feels as if it was added as an afterthought. Obviously the new Busch hasn’t stopped the Cardinals from winning. If anything it seems to have made a very good team even better, but in imagining what could have been, the new Busch is just … fine.

5) Tropicana Field, St Petersburg, Florida

David Ortiz manages to avoid hitting the catwalk at Tropicana Field. Photograph: Brian Blanco/Getty Images

Don’t let the word “Field” fool you, there is nothing pastoral or sunny or tropical about this place. It is the single, most dismal baseball stadium into which you will ever step. Many years ago, when people in the Tampa-St Petersburg area started pushing for a team, the sense was that a city with as much heat and rain as St Pete should have a dome.

This was in the late 1970s and domes were kind of the rage. Houston had the Astrodome, Seattle had a dome and Montreal, Minneapolis and Toronto were getting ones for their baseball teams. So it only seemed natural that the Tampa Bay area do the same. Which it did, in 1990. Then nobody came.

For several years, the empty dome was used by other teams as leverage against their own local governments to persuade them to aid in building new stadiums. At various times, the Giants, Mariners and White Sox seemed certain to move to St Petersburg. Finally Tampa Bay was given an expansion team and we were introduced to a horrible stadium with a shadowy gloom and an odd catwalk over the middle of the field that routinely sends harmless pop flys careening in strange directions.

It didn’t have to be this way. Original plans for the stadium included a giant sail hanging over the field instead of a concrete dome. That would have been nice, allowing breezes to sift through the stands while keeping fans dry in the rain and protected from the sun. Now that fans have failed to show up to watch a very good team in recent years, the sail idea has been discussed again for a new ballpark without gloom or catwalks. Maybe then St Pete can get it right all these years later.



6) Memorial Coliseum, Los Angeles, California

The Memorial Coliseum is a grand old stadium but not build for the modern age. Photograph: John Antczak/AP

College football is filled with stadiums that could stand upgrades but it would be irresponsible to criticize them. Already US colleges have misplaced priorities when it comes to sports. The so-called “arms race” between schools to build the best facilities pull millions in donations from more meaningful academic projects. The last thing American colleges need are better football stadiums.

But the Coliseum is not a truly a college football stadium even though its primary tenant is the University of Southern California. It is a grand, old stadium that has waited for 30 years to be renovated into something spectacular like this or even this and yet sits fading in the parking lots. The NFL appear to have long given up trying to do something with the Coliseum. So have many others.

Built for the 1932 Olympics it looks today much as it did then, which is the beauty of Coliseum and its problem. It’s not Fenway Park, it can’t look more than 70 years old. It has no function in a modern world. It’s a wonderful old building but fans have to contends with the long rows of seats, huge hikes up dozens of rows of steps and minimal amenities.

The history here is fantastic but history can only go so far.