Tuesday will mark the fifth anniversary of the most important date in Tottenham Hotspur’s modern history. April 3, 2019 – when Spurs finally play their first game at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
It took 3 years to build, but almost two decades to build. Since Daniel Levy took over as chairman of Tottenham shortly after the acquisition of ENIC in December 2000, he had 3 big ambitions: to make the club competitive on the pitch. , build an educational floor, and build a world-class stadium.
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He and the Spurs had already achieved two and now, after a grueling, protracted and incredibly costly process, they had finally controlled the third. A remarkable achievement that would reshape Tottenham’s finances and wider position in the game.
The main points of the structure are well documented. The delays, the rising prices (a £250 million stadium ended up costing £1. 2 billion), the nearly two seasons spent at Wembley, plus a match played in Milton Keynes, almost 80 kilometres away. Then there’s the famous VIP Cheese Room, which is touted as a symbol of the stadium’s excesses, but which Spurs have denied is part of their plans.
Some of you may have noticed the chaos at the stadium site, when a source told Construction News that there were staff “rampant, drinking cans early in the morning before going to the site and snorting coke in the bathrooms. “Mace, the company that built The Stadium, rejected that characterization at the time, and there was no indication that it was aware of instances of alcohol and drug use, or that it had not taken action. Mace did not respond to an interview request for this article.
It’s not about telling everything that happened in the structuring process: there are enough curtains to fill a book.
Instead, in the first component of a two-component series about the stadium, The Athletic will read about how the structure affected club members and replaced the way it operated, listening to those who experienced it first-hand, usually speaking anonymously with their relationships. .
Birthday turns out to be an apt word for the next step. Several attendees at the inauguration described it as a wedding day: “Years of preparation, then it was over in an instant. “
Katrina Law and Martin Cloake were co-chairs of the Tottenham Hotspur Supporters’ Trust (THST) for the opening and framing of the stadium. In previous years it had been observed that attendance was accepted to move fans to Wembley, to engage in discussions and disputes with Wembley. The club is concerned about ticket sales for the new stadium and rejects the concept of play in Stratford or Milton Keynes. It was a tumultuous time.
“Honestly, we were out of it,” Law recalled, reflecting the jubilant character of the Spurs fans who attended the opening match against Crystal Palace. “We were on a balcony and thousands of people were there a few hours before kick-off. “off. It’s so exciting and emotional.
Part of the emotion came from thinking about the other people who were there. Darren Alexander, the former co-chairman of THST, died in 2014, while Jonathan Waite, Tottenham’s fan liaison officer who had been heavily involved in the stadium. construction, died 4 years later.
“We were thinking about it because Darren had accepted it as true when it looked like we were going to move to East London,” Cloake says. “We had been on a great journey. “
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The club’s manager at the time, Mauricio Pochettino, was also thrilled to hear the roars of the fans from his workplace as he prepared to enter the pitch. Levy had tears in his eyes as he watched the opening ceremony.
Paul Coyte, the stadium box announcer, recalled feeling emotional and nervous when he told the nearly 60,000 enthusiastic crowd: “We’re home, we’re back home. “
Five years later, he says: “What caught my attention was the noise from the South Stand. We had never heard that noise before. That’s when you can feel it. “
“It was unreal,” says Law. There was a huge sense of pride in the fact that this was the most productive stadium in the world. The perspectives from every seat were astounding and there were plenty of nods to White Hart Lane. It was as if we were entering a new era and propelling ourselves. I say, “The giant has awakened. “
Not everyone felt so triumphant. ” The first game you were satisfied with is over,” says a source concerned about the process, noting how exhausting the years leading up to April 2019 were.
Others say it was a tricky time, where the tension and tension was almost overwhelming at times. It’s hard to overstate how complete the stadium structure was: it dominated every space in the club and became tense as delays piled up. “Completely insane”; “Absolutely ridiculous”; “I’ve never worked this hard” are some of the tactics described by other people on the ground. Project officials said there were times when they slept a little.
The original plan was for the stadium to be fit to face Liverpool in September 2018. When it became apparent that problems with critical protection systems meant this would be unimaginable and the exposure around the structure became ever greater. More negatively, the internal atmosphere has become increasingly tense. There was a specific concern about leaks to the press, not helped by articles such as the one in Construction News in September 2018 that described dysfunctional functioning of the structure, adding reports that “A minority of staff were under the influence of alcohol and, in some cases, cocaine while working on the project. “
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Tina Chisholm, who runs Coach and Horses on Tottenham High Road, welcomed some of the painters to her pub. He laughs as he tells a story from that time: “Once, some of them came here for lunch and got stuck. Drinking. They were thrown off the ground and told they wouldn’t be able to paint that afternoon. So they stayed here drinking all day!
The chaos of the structure is extreme, almost comical, but internally at Tottenham there is also a sense of frenzy. During this era from the summer of 2017 to April 2019, Spurs were looking to be competitive in the Premier League and Champions League, and were looking to satisfy enthusiasts and business partners at their transitional home at Wembley, while navigating an incredibly ambitious stadium structure that also involved challenges, such as the sale of naming rights. Everyone was under enormous pressure: around 35,000 more people tuned in every day to see live images of the structure.
The Spurs didn’t find a spouse with naming rights until the stadium opened, but they had positive conversations with several major corporations during that time. Part of the challenge was to sell the vision of the stadium while it was still under construction, but despite this. , there was a lot of interest. Tottenham’s position has been that they want to be the right spouse and for the corporate profit to be considered as a total on the balance sheet.
There have been tragedies, including the death of Waite, the club’s hugely popular SLO, in November 2018. Not surprisingly, the structure had a negative effect on other people at the time and after. Everyone was proud to be part of such a large-scale project, but some felt that his tireless paintings had not been sufficiently appreciated. Many left in the years that followed, feeling they didn’t have much to give, despite the Covid-19 pandemic and the way the club handled it. It was also a significant thing in that (the Spurs’ position remains that they were looking to protect jobs).
The Spurs were changing. It is estimated that between 2014 and 2022, Tottenham grew from a company that employed around 250 people to 700 more people. The new stadium is a symbol of Tottenham’s transformation from a rising Premier League club to one with global ambitions and a hugely different source of revenue. income and expenses.
However, it would be a mistake to characterize the structure of the level as a procedure or a negative experience. Some of the attendees don’t fondly forget how challenging and exciting it was to be a component of something so ambitious and challenging. Others point to the “entrepreneurial” spirit of the club at the time, led through Levy, who was a force of nature at this time and oversaw everything, adding the smallest details. The Spurs were a much smaller organization at the time, as those numbers indicate, with almost a haul. Feel the way the new stadium was built.
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The reopening of the Corner Pin is a shining example of the club’s entrepreneurial spirit at the time. The pub had closed in 2010 and was used by the club as a workplace to buy tickets until 2020; however, the Spurs partnered with local brewery Beavertown, which also operates a microbrewery in the stadium’s South Stand, to reopen the pub 3 years ago in a more modern form. Before, craft beer didn’t exist in major British stadiums, let alone an on-site brewery, however, it has been a successful venture. If other people had smart ideas, they might just put them into practice.
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One of the other people was Simon Bamber, who oversaw the club’s advertising operations during this era and was described by Tottenham after his death in 2021 as “an integral component of the delivery of the stadium”. Bamber led a team that laid the groundwork for the stadium to become what it is today: managing relationships around concerts, the NFL, European rugby and others that helped make it the 365-day-of-the-year venue Levy envisioned.
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And the stadium is surely Levy’s vision. When you compare the building’s legacy, much of it goes to the Spurs president.
In many ways, this encompasses the central debates around it. Is he the ruthless visionary who carried out the structure despite a lack of help from taxpayers or support from the geographic region?Or the micro-manager who was so talented at the stadium’s main points that he obsessed with the look of the toilets and who he recently described as “perhaps leading our architects to distraction”?
The truth is, those two things are not mutually exclusive. Levy achieved his vision largely through his absolute determination to make sure that everything similar to the structure is of the best quality and unique. Some other people involved recommend that Levy hasn’t micromanaged as much. as it’s supposed to be.
No decision was made without their consent, there was also a task force, led by Andrew Downs. Levy was not easy in his judgment and pushed each and every one to make each and every component of the stadium better than what they had seen elsewhere.
Every Tuesday I had a one-day meeting with the stadium assignment team and once a week I would walk around the stadium to check it out for myself. He looked at the images from the cameras that followed the construction, zooming in to see why things weren’t in order. still.
“His attention to detail in everything else,” as one source puts it, was born out of a desire for each and every detail of the stadium to reflect well on the club and meet the needs of Haringey’s board of directors.
Levy didn’t just address the small main points: he was also able to see the big picture and some of the stadium’s ultimate unique features were a product of his refusal to settle for anything mundane. In 2013, for example, he commissioned architect Populous to reconsider the original design of the KSS, believing that more can be done to make the new stadium more unique.
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He then pushed for the exclusive design of the South Stand, and when Populous had a plan for the connecting bridge between Lilywhite House and the stadium as a fairly general enclosed glass bridge, Levy looked for anything else from an aesthetic and architectural standpoint. Hence the “twisted” look that Populous finally came up with. Levy also very carefully controlled the appointments with architect F3, who designed some of the most important artistic elements of the stadium, adding the locker room and media domain (as well as the educational field). .
Internally, some have been frustrated by Levy’s exacting standards, and others because the president contributed to the delays by asking himself everything. Others say that without Levy’s power and determination, it would have lasted even longer.
Levy’s strategy for running is to set a very tight deadline, knowing that if he exceeds, it will be longer than reaching one that is more achievable but much later.
In the case of the stadium, those familiar with the structures industry have the idea that the summer of 2018 was an unrealistic target for the finishing touch, which comes down to Levy.
In assignments of this size, the owner might choose to pay more for a framing firm to perform the task at a consistent price, leaving the framing firm to make up the difference in the event of cost overruns. That’s not the case here, with Levy stating in his programme notes for Crystal Palace that no corporate structure would devote consistent value to the stadium structure, so “we ended up taking on all the threats and suffering ourselves”. This left Levy and his team as assignment managers. , which meant more paints for them and a bigger role in driving the custom aspects of the stadium. In theory, this allowed them to cut prices themselves, but it also left Spurs with more risk and, ultimately, a bigger bill.
The timing of the stadium’s opening was delayed also offers insight into Spurs’ momentum at the top.
A source who tested the stadium weeks before its opening against Liverpool in September 2018 felt the timetable was so unrealistic that he warned Levy had too much muscle over the project. “Obviously, it won’t be ready, but everyone who was talking about telling you the likelihood of it opening up,” the source told The Athletic in 2020. “I would describe it as ‘the cult of Daniel. ‘ Everyone knew it wouldn’t be finished in time, but essentially it was like King Canute or the emperor’s new robe. No one would turn to him and say, “You won’t be ready. “
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Similarly, some staff members recall walking through the stadium a few months before it opened in September 2018 and sharing the idea that it wouldn’t be ready, albeit without meaning anything. As an accountant, the director of operations and finance, Matthew Collecott. , said in 2019 that during the construction of the stadium, he, Levy and executive director Donna-Maria Cullen “had the merit of being able to be quite rude to each other!We’ve known each other for about 20 years, so we can be really honest. “
Faced with public optimism that a September 2018 touch-off date was still a possibility, Spurs felt they had no choice. Saying anything else has led marketers to slack off.
In any case, the delays have had an effect: they have aroused resentment among some actors.
“When I felt we were the most capable of winning a trophy, we had to move to Wembley,” then-club captain Hugo Lloris told The Athletic last month. “The year before, at White Hart Lane, we won 17 games and drew 2. We thought that if we stayed, we could fit into that.
Meanwhile, the club’s supporters, who had largely endured the game at Wembley for a year, have become increasingly restless in Tottenham’s second season away from home.
In that 2018-19 campaign, they even had to play a League Cup match “at home” against Watford in Milton Keynes, with Wembley unavailable. The October 2018 match against Manchester City at Wembley was played one day after an NFL game. with the American football markings still visible. Regardless, fans voted with their feet, and attendance fell from a peak of more than 85,000 in 2016, when Spurs played their European matches at Wembley, to less than 30,000 for the January 2019 league match. opposite to Watford.
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Generally speaking, the Wembley experience is not universally considered negative by those who lived through it. Many times it served as a bridge to the new stadium, helping Spurs understand what it takes to manage operations on such a large field. Only a few Tottenham staff were permanently established at Wembley, and almost tripling the capacity at White Hart Lane meant Spurs could attract more enthusiasts and welcome more overseas crowds, while organising fitness days in a very different way. the company to another hospitality offering, much closer to the new stadium than the much more basic White Hart Lane.
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It was at Wembley that Spurs learned how to run a mega-stadium and organise match days, as well as primary events, such as the 3-1 win over Real Madrid in November 2017. There were new protocols and those who were there say it replaced the club’s mentality.
Many players also enjoyed the game at Wembley and for Pochettino, this cemented his role as the club’s second most important user after Levy.
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Many resources felt that Levy was less concerned about football during this era because he was so focused on the stadium. Many appreciated the greater autonomy he left Pochettino, and it coincided with Tottenham’s emergence as the main player in the Champions League, reaching the round of 16. In both seasons away from White Hart Lane, the moment ended at the new stadium and the last one in Madrid. Spurs’ view is that football decisions have been made through football’s control group.
Still, Pochettino was frustrated at being away from White Hart Lane, and to his credit he managed to keep everything in position on the footballing side. He and everyone connected with Spurs will be wondering if it is possible that they have won the Premier League. during that time without the inconvenience of playing their home games away from Tottenham.
Even as April 2019 approaches, there is still a lot of work to be done. Before the last two test events (an Under-18 match against Southampton and a legends match against Inter Milan), there were around a dozen other matches. On occasion, adding a Super Bowl party in the NFL living room with club legends Clive Allen and Darren Anderton, to check security systems in the area.
The security team detected problems with the controls and had to make sure they were all sorted and approved for opening. They worked through the night, knowing there was no margin for error. The controls also provided other lessons, such as the enormous amount of food and drink that other people sought to consume and the popularity of Beavertown beer. Spurs realised they were moving from an undisputed football club to something bigger.
Once all the security checks were done, the Spurs were still fit to go home. Before the attack on Palace, fans were amazed by some of the touches of the new pitch that noded to White Hart Lane, such as the old programs on the walls, the old shots hung, the bricks of the original ‘shelf’ in the east stand that were now part of The Shelf bar.
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Spurs beat Palace 2-0 and the stadium was very well received, but those involved had time to pause and congratulate each other. There’s still a lot of work to be done: operationally, commercially, and most importantly, to make certain players have the maximum productive platform to succeed on the field.
Building the stadium isn’t a goal in itself, it’s a way to help Tottenham get to the next level.
As next week’s article will show, the last five years that the stadium has been combined in this regard.
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(Top photos: English Heritage/Heritage Images/Getty Images)