What is the ‘Blue Wave’ Dan Meis has been referring to?

This week will be quite momentous for Everton football club and the fans, and the club have prepared a video to mark it too.

After months of speculation, and indeed, years of waiting and decades of hoping, we will finally get to see what the Toffees’ new home at the Bramley-Moore docks are going to look like.

There’s a few activities planned for this week, key among them being the kickoff of the second round of public consultations with the people of Merseyside in which designs for the new stadium as well as plans for the dockside area will be shown officially for the first time, starting Friday 26th and going on until Sunday 25th August.

However, for a select few, a private event will be held on Thursday 25th with architect Dan Meis in attendance where they’ll get a sneak peek on what the club’s vision for their new permanent home will be.

Meis has been touting the ‘blue wave’ idea for some time on social media, fueling speculation on what that would mean for the new stadium. Having previously stated that he was very impressed and equally inspired by Borussia Dortmund’s home end (the Yellow Wall), we are likely to see a gigantic home end that will tower over the pitch while creating an intimidating ‘fortress’ effect much like the current ‘bearpit’ at Goodison, but magnified many times over.

During a previous stadium consultation, a couple of concept designs were shown, including a steep home end and a main stand as well. So here’s a couple of thoughts on what the ‘Blue Wave might be with regards to the new arena.

Since it is quite unlikely the entire stadium is going to be covered, one guess is that the ‘Blue Wave’ is referring to a covered main stand which will be shaped like a big wave to reflect the waterfront heritage of the location of the stadium.

However, Meis responded to that tweet saying that was incorrect as there were limits to how steep a stand can be, and the multi-level concept was ‘fictional’.

Which then brings us to the other idea, that the shape of the home end might be such as to look like a wave, such as the design posted to Meis’ Instagram account.

There have been some complaints from fans that having a steep home end like Dortmund would be copying the concept, but Meis was pretty vehement about his viewpoint -

Meis went on to add -

Numerous other comments have been made about preserving the look of the dockside area and and taking style elements from Goodison Park (like the Littlewoods clock and the Archibald Leitch latticework) as well as the docks, such as the old Tobacco warehouse nearby.

Photo by Liverpool Post and Echo/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images

This has given rise to conjecture that there will be plenty of exposed brick used in the new stadium, though probably not as much as used in the LucasOil Stadium.

Earlier today we also heard more details emerge, including the orientation of the stadium on the dock site, with the pitch running alongside the River Mersey.

It appears that Meis has dropped enough hints during the stadium consultations and on social media for Blues to get a pretty decent idea on what to expect this week, but there’s certainly nothing like seeing for ourselves what the club has planned for our new home.