If you see London as the football capital of Europe, watch this weekend’s FA Cup matches.
League matches are organised in such a way that a limited number of London clubs organise matches on the same day, but the third round of the FA Cup attracted 10 clubs from the capital at home: AFC Wimbledon, Arsenal, Brentford, Chelsea, Crystal Palace (last night), Fulham, Millwall. , Queens Park Rangers, Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham United.
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It has prompted lengthy negotiations between the Football Association and the Metropolitan Police, and a concerted effort to spread the fixtures across the weekend.
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But it’s also a good time to celebrate the fact that there are still so many gambling clubs in central London.
Twenty-five years ago this was unlikely.
Around the turn of the century, when several clubs were moving out of their old stadiums, the trend across the country was to abandon central parts of towns and cities, and head for greenfield sites on the outskirts. Suitable land was more likely to be available and was considerably cheaper.
Thus, Bolton Wanderers, Stoke City, Coventry City and Reading have moved for the first time in the middle of nowhere. Middlesbrough, Sunderland, Derby County and Southampton have also moved (admittedly, no more and no less far). Occasionally, a piece of land quite close to the old land was available.
In London, it’s a different story. In a history of London football swap in recent years, Arsenal play outdoors at under-25 level, Chelsea at Battersea, Tottenham at Enfield and Brentford at Kingston. Somehow, that didn’t happen.
Millwall’s was the first stadium in England to be completed after the Taylor Report, according to which all major stadiums had to have seats. The original Den was an infamous, decadent, and inhospitable mess, even if the house enthusiasts were inevitably unhappy to abandon a field that opposing groups (and, more accurately, enthusiasts) hated to visit.
The new site is less than a kilometer upstream from the road. Fans who exercised up to New Cross Gate and then headed north to the old box can make the same journey, just past the new dwellings in place, and to the new floor, like the old one, sandwiched between the train tracks.
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Millwall, it should be pointed out, were formed on the Isle of Dogs in London’s East End before moving south of the river in 1910. Coincidentally, their final game as an east-London club came against Woolwich Arsenal — who, three years later, would also cross the river, moving from south to north, and dropping the “Woolwich” from their name.
This shows that it was not unprecedented for London clubs to make mass moves in the capital. When Arsenal were looking for another new floor after overtaking Highbury, it is forgotten how much they threw their net.
Most famously, they seriously thought about buying Wembley, rivalling the Football Association’s bid until the FA bought the site from Wembley PLC in March 1999. Arsenal’s fear of Wembley is not about its location but about its size.
“We did all the numbers at Wembley and it didn’t work out,” former chief executive Ken Friar told The Athletic in 2020. “If you have a stadium that’s too big and you don’t fill it, then you have to remove it. “parts that look awful, or you have to reduce your costs significantly.
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Arsenal also discussed moving to Finsbury Park, although planning permission for that move would have been near-impossible. They also considered leaving London entirely, to an unspecified greenfield site only ever described as “being near the M25”. They had “one or two” meetings with Tottenham about a shared ground, at a point when many were asking why Italian clubs, for example, could make ground shares work but English clubs couldn’t.
The rumoured site was Alexandra Palace, which had also been suggested in the late 1970s as a venue for both a national stadium and the location for an Arsenal/Tottenham groundshare.
There were also rumours that Arsenal would move to a location close to King’s Cross (the new Eurostar terminal had preceded them) and there was even talk that they could move to the Millennium Dome Array which now houses the O2 Arena.
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It was completely unexpected that Arsenal were located just 500 metres from Highbury. Although the land on which the Emirates would be built has been described as a municipally-owned landfill, the Arsenal has also acquired land from more than 250 companies. Sainsbury’s strip of land posed a specific problem.
In the end, Arsenal stayed in Islington, much to the delight of the council, who were desperate to keep the club in the district. The enthusiasts came out of the Arsenal tube station and discovered the countryside on their left. Now they turn right, pass the road, cross a bridge over the railroad tracks and reach the “new” terrain.
However, that change to five minutes is huge compared to Tottenham’s move. Although they have built a new stadium, Tottenham play on practically the same site as the old White Hart Lane. Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium was built around the old one. while the club was still playing there.
The acquisition of the entire new site took some time, and a key local owner, Archway Sheet Metal Works, refused to sell it in the first place. But after a serious fire at the site in November 2014, Tottenham announced a deal with the company a few days ago. months later. Four years later, they were betting on the new field.
GO FURTHER
A from Tottenham Hotspur Stadium
This resolution was not on the agenda. Alongside rumours of sharing the pitch with Arsenal, there was also a serious suggestion that Tottenham would move 4 miles north to a new venue in the Enfield district, which is now the home of Lee Valley Athletics. Center.
In 2001, Enfield Council approved plans to build a new stadium with a capacity of 43,000 people, to be used for the 2005 World Athletics Championships; the UK government deemed the stadium construction charge prohibitive. The International Association of Athletics Federations (now known as World Athletics) refused, and occasionally the championships ended in Helsinki, greatly embarrassing the UK. If this stadium had been built for the tournament, there is a strong chance that Tottenham would have ended up there.
In fact, Tottenham’s preference to move to a stadium built for an athletics festival is demonstrated through their preference to move to the stadium built for the Olympics, which were held in London in 2012.
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Both Tottenham and West Ham wanted to move to the Olympic Stadium, although they had different plans for it. Tottenham planned to rip out the athletics track and turn it into a football-centric stadium, but West Ham eventually won the right to play there, in part, because their plans included keeping the track, which meant the stadium could continue to host major athletics events.
It was a protracted debate and even after West Ham were granted the right to play on the pitch, Leyton Orient lodged a serious protest with the government, complaining that West Ham appeared in their “patch” and with their offer of reasonable season tickets. To ensure they filled the 60,000-capacity stadium, West Ham would pull out of Orient, located 2. 4 kilometres away.
That episode showed how problematic it can be when clubs move across London, although it’s worth pointing out that Leyton Orient chairman Barry Hearn had previously been interested in his club playing at the stadium, offering to change their name to “London Orient”. They had previously been known as Clapton Orient when playing in that part of London, before being known simply as Orient until 1987.
West Ham’s move to the London Stadium, as it is now known, was the most dramatic move the capital has seen in the modern era. Many supporters were unhappy. But in purely geographic terms, if we accept that Leyton Orient didn’t have the fanbase to justify occupying the stadium, it made more sense than Tottenham playing there. West Ham’s move from Upton Park was 3.9km, Tottenham’s from White Hart Lane would have been 8km. Ultimately, a stadium in east London is home to an east-London club.
The situation in south-west London is equally complex and involves the two newest stadiums to be built. Brentford and Wimbledon’s new stadiums were completed during the pandemic and initially hosted matches played in front of near-empty stands.
The history of Wimbledon Stadium is that of any other club. Until the early 1990s they played on Plough Lane, north of the city, before abandoning the run-down track and sharing the track at Crystal Palace for several years. Then, very controversially, the club’s owners opted to move to Milton Keynes, turning the club’s call to Milton Keynes Dons. It wasn’t even the most dramatic move proposed: rumours had long circulated that Wimbledon would move to Dublin in the 1990s, and it recently emerged that then-Prime Minister Tony Blair had encouraged a move to Belfast.
Ultimately, after three decades of suffering to get “home,” the phoenix club, AFC Wimbledon, is back in place: about 350 meters from its old court, measured from center to center.
Before moving to Plough Lane, Wimbledon played their matches in Kingston upon Thames. They purchased the Kingsmeadow ground from non-League Kingstonian in 2003, before selling it to Chelsea in 2017 to fund their move back to Plough Lane. Chelsea now use it for their women’s and reserves sides, with Kingstonian still looking for a permanent home.
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In 2002, when Brentford chairman Ron Noades decided that staying at Griffin Park was not in the club’s best interest, the club signed a two-year contract with Kingstonian to share Kingsmeadow. “We can’t work at Griffin Park without wasting money and I’m not sure we can just play like a football club without wasting money,” Noades told the Richmond and Twickenham Times. “We have to move to the Kingstonian in a year’s time for next season. This would allow us to reduce our losses while we search for permanent housing.
But that resolution didn’t happen: AFC Wimbledon ended there. It wasn’t ideal, but it made more sense for a newly formed club to play 7 kilometres away from where they intended to be, than Brentford, an old-fashioned football club, betting 9 kilometres away. from its classic terrain.
Nineteen years after the plans were announced, Brentford has finally opened its new flat less than a mile from Griffin Park, next to an exercise station and almost on the banks of the River Thames. Like Millwall, Arsenal, Tottenham and Wimbledon, they have remained in their set setup.
It’s also worth thinking about the clubs that haven’t moved. For years, it was suggested that Chelsea could move 3 miles east across the Thames to a new stadium on the site of the former Battersea power station, but this resolution never came to fruition.
There was also the story in 2018 of Fulham owner Shahid Khan, who also owns the Jacksonville Jaguars NFL franchise, which tried to buy Wembley. While he has never explicitly stated that he envisions Fulham betting there, this is not beyond the realm of mind. Be careful, given that Fulham play on one of the smallest pitches in the Premier League, even with the recent extension. It would have been a 10km trip.
Taking into account all stadium moves by current Football League clubs since 1992, and including Everton’s upcoming move to Bramley-Moore Dock, it’s striking how little the London clubs have moved.
Whereas several clubs have moved a serious distance from their previous homes, London’s clubs have remained close to their roots. (This graph excludes MK Dons and takes the old Plough Lane, Wimbledon FC’s last ground in Wimbledon, as the predecessor of AFC Wimbledon’s new ground, and takes the Goldstone Ground rather than the Withdean Stadium as Brighton’s traditional home. It also attempts to measure from centre spot to centre spot).
Considering that London is the most populous city in Western Europe (according to official city boundaries) and that locating land for housing is a problem, let alone much bigger developments like a football stadium, this is a remarkable circumstance that should not be taken for granted. . . Twenty years ago, London clubs were expected to do what Atletico Madrid did: flee the centre for the suburbs. None did.
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It can simply be argued that the specificity of some London club names encourages them to stick around: Brentford are rarely very Brentford if they play away from the city of Brentford. But that hasn’t stopped Arsenal, Millwall or Orient from moving in the past. That hasn’t stopped Tottenham from looking to move to Stratford or Wimbledon from moving to Milton Keynes. And that hasn’t stopped Barnet, a National League team, from leaving Underhill, leaving the London borough of Barnet altogether and heading to The Hive in the London borough of Harrow.
The weekend’s schedule does not suit many people, neither the Metropolitan Police, who see their resources exhausted, nor the fans whose matches have been moved to Friday or Sunday. But it’s an opportunity to celebrate the fact that, despite leaving London clubs, they haven’t left their homes entirely.
(Top photo: Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)