For fans of North London’s Tottenham Hotspur football club, 2019 promises more than just the possibility of the squad’s first piece of silverware in a decade. The Spurs, as they are known, are scheduled to move into their new 62,000-seat Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

Designed by Populous, an architectural firm headquartered in Kansas City, Mo., the £850 million ($1.4 billion) state-of-the-art stadium will feature a Michelin-calibre restaurant, a fromagerie and a microbrewery capable of pouring 10,000 pints per minute. The ground will also boast a retractable robotic pitch and heated seats with built-in USB ports. For a different view of the action, fans can head to the “sky walk” and walk across the roof of the stadium.

Like many of the first modern sports stadiums built beginning in the late 19th century, Tottenham’s old ground, White Hart Lane, was not radically different from those built by the ancient Greeks and Romans centuries earlier. Spectators sat in ascending rows of seats and watched the field below, perhaps with a pint or a burger.

But now, sports teams from London to Los Angeles are locked in a heated arms race and are pouring billions of dollars into building new stadiums that – like Tottenham’s new one – will provide an experience that is increasingly dictated by the fan and more glitzy, unique and technologically advanced than ever before.

“The stadium is becoming networked,” said Saad Rafi, a partner at Deloitte Canada and the chief executive of the Toronto 2015 Pan Am Parapan Am Games Organizing Committee. “Like an iPhone, it allows you to add on to your experience through apps and to personalize it.”

For instance, at Levi’s Stadium, the new US$1.3 billion home of the San Francisco 49ers, spectators can use their phones to watch replays from multiple camera angles, tune into the in-stadium broadcasts or check the queues for concession stalls and bathrooms. The Sacramento Kings’ home base, the Golden1 Center, tracks fan sentiment via an app and feeds that information to various sensors that adjust the building conditions, such as its temperature, accordingly.

The shift is not just a way to unlock more match day revenue for team owners, but also part of a fight “to get people off their couch and off their tablet and into the stadium,” Rafi said.

Home entertainment systems have changed rapidly over the years for the better, allowing fans to watch the game from a multitude of angles, in high-definition and often at a cost that is much more affordable than frequent trips to the stadium. Nearly 60 per cent of fans surveyed by the tech giant Cisco in 2013, said they would rather watch games at home than live in person.

It is also a response to changing demographic trends. Millennials aren’t filling stadium seats like their Baby Boomer parents did, and the new stadiums incorporate features that are designed to appeal to a generation that experts say values experiences over products.

To do this, stadiums are increasingly becoming multi-purpose entertainment spaces and setting aside specific areas for fans to congregate with each other. A basic illustration of this is the WestJet Flight Deck at the Rogers Centre in Toronto, a standing-room only section that any fan with a ticket can enter. More unique examples include the Jackson Jaguars’ refurbished T1AA Bank Field in Florida, which features poolside cabanas, and the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, which has a nightclub overlooking centre court.

“It used to be that you go to an arena or a stadium to watch a sport,” said Mark-Anthony Ashfield, a partner with Deloitte Canada. “Now, in some cases that’s secondary. You go to an event and there happens to be a sport being played.”

It is the growth of e-sports, though, that “will impact arenas more than anything else,” said Scott Ralston, a principal at architectural design firm HOK.

The growth of the sport is forcing architects to rethink not only the technology needed to provide the necessary connectivity, but to also grapple with a bevy of novel questions: Should the seats have desks or pop-up screens? Could spectators don wearable devices so they can feel the action of the video games through haptic feedback? What about holograms or virtual reality?

“This is not science fiction,” Ralston said. “It’s around the corner.”

To be sure, there are many who do not endorse the high-tech grounds.

A survey from the Initiative on Global Markets at Chicago Booth University in 2017 found that most economists believe the benefits of the stadiums will be outweighed by the costs to the taxpayers who, in many cases, fund the projects.

Others worry that the more plugged-in experience on offer means most spectators will spend the majority of their time at a sporting event looking at a small smartphone screen as opposed to the action on the field of play.

Ralston concedes that bridging the gap between the traditionalists and the more digitally-engaged fans is “hard to do successfully.” The key, he said, is to give people choice. A stadium could make one section WiFi-free for one set of fans and make another WiFi-abundant for a different group of spectators.

Ashfield said that at many iconic, older grounds, such as Wrigley Stadium in Chicago or Fenway Park in Boston, even if they can be retrofitted to incorporate the latest in stadium technology, they decline to be – and not just because the process can be quite expensive.

“They’re really hesitant to try to move away from the culture and the historical experience that they’ve created,” he said.