By Will Pavia, the Times, May 18^th 2007

Huddersfield Town are not going to Wembley this year, but in an overarching sense, the club have already left their mark on the new stadium.

According to Rod Sheard, Wembley's joint principal architect, the inspiration behind the £800 million stadium and its arch lies at the home ground of the Coca-Cola League One club.

Sheard remembers visiting Huddersfield in the early Nineties, after the club announced a design competition to redevelop a new stadium on the outskirts of the town to replace the old Leeds Road ground.

"Football clubs in those days did not have much money and the stadiums were pretty utilitarian - crinkled tin on concrete," he said.

Sheard harboured aspirations for something grander. "Stadiums were rectilinear then," he said. "But our design was oval, and we spanned the distance using curved arches instead of straight trusses."

Huddersfield was a turning point for Sheard and his firm, and for stadium architecture involving arches. The Royal Institute of British Architects named the ground - now known as the Galpharm Stadium - building of the year, and Sheard went on to work on the Sydney Olympic Stadium, where arches rise like the rims of butterfly wings.

Fast-forward to August 1999 and a studio in Putney. Sheard, of HOK Sport, and Ken Shuttle-worth, of Foster and Partners at the time, are sitting around a table with colleagues, looking at what was to be the new Wembley: an arena with four high masts, unveiled with great fanfare only a week before. Something, it was felt, was not quite right.

"Ken said: 'What made Sydney so special?' " Sheard said. "It was those big arches.

We all started to sketch arches. We could see the roof structure would have to be on the north side so that as the sun arched through the southern sky, as little roof structure as possible would cast shadows."

So it was to be a single arch careering over the North Stand. It is now widely referred to as Foster's Arch, despite the fact that Norman Foster was not there on the day of its inception. Huddersfield Town FC get no credit at all.