It has become a common occurrence at Tottenham home games this season, particularly when they win. Tens of thousands of fans who have been in the south stand all afternoon stay long after the final whistle, sometimes long into the night, drinking and singing Ange Postecoglou’s name. There is an expanded concourse called ‘The Marketplace’, and an outdoor area behind it called the ‘Fan Zone’, and between them they keep fans entertained, singing and drinking together long after the rest of the ground has emptied out.
This was part of the vision when the stadium was built. Firstly that it should be a place where fans spend far more time (and money) than they ever would in the old White Hart Lane. The club know very well how much more ‘dwell time’ there is in American sports stadiums, and were determined to learn from it. This has been one of the triumphs of Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, turning it into a place where fans queue up to get let in hours before kick off, rather than just darting straight into their seat with minutes to go.
These scenes are also a marker of something else, the fact that this season Spurs fans can see their values, their “Tottenham DNA” reflected in the character of the team and the manager. For too much of the stadium’s five-year lifespan — 17 months of which were lost to the pandemic — that has not been the case.
While the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium has been successful in so many ways, transforming the matchday experience, elevating the global profile of the club, bringing in more money through football and non-football events than anyone thought possible, it has also prompted something of a battle for the soul of Tottenham Hotspur.
This is a club which has always had a distinct feel. Its teams have been known more for their style than their substance at times. It has played on the same patch of suburban north London — excepting their enforced exile at Wembley — since 1899. The club has now been in the same hands for 23 years, which in modern football is noteworthy in itself.
The challenge Spurs have faced is to build this shining tyre, this ground of the future, the £1.2billion ($1.5bn) stadium that turns them from an aspirational club into an elite one. While retaining that imagination, that family character, that noble romance, that entrepreneurial spirit which makes them what they are.
(Photo: Tottenham Hotspur FC via Getty Images)
The first thing to talk about here is money. That is what makes the football world go round and Tottenham have never been a club who can just rely on endless injections of it from their owners. They have had to make it for themselves. The old White Hart Lane was wonderful in many ways but trying to make money from it was like trying to get blood from a stone.
Manchester City and Arsenal moved grounds in the 2000s, Manchester United and Liverpool were expanding their stadiums, and Tottenham needed to catch up. White Hart Lane would bring in on average £1m ($1.26m) per home game, and so until Spurs left, their annual matchday revenue would be just over £40m ($51m) per year. In the last season at White Hart Lane, 2016-17, where Spurs made £45m ($57m), Arsenal and United both brought in over £100m ($126m) on matchdays.
Compared to White Hart Lane, the new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is a gigantic 62,000-seater ATM. Tottenham make close to £6m ($7.5m) per matchday. Over the course of a season that makes for an unbeatable number. Over the 2021-22 season, the first back after Covid-19, Spurs made £106m ($134m) in matchday revenue, second only to Manchester United. Even though their European campaign that season, such as it was, constituted three home games in the Europa Conference League. Last season’s figures are expected to be even higher when the accounts are released shortly.
To some fans this may just be numbers on a spreadsheet but in the 2020s it is likely to matter more than ever before. In years gone by, the most important determinant of whether a team would succeed was whether or not their owners were willing to pour in money, which meant that Tottenham were at a disadvantage. But in the PSR era, where financial losses are strictly limited, teams will ultimately stand or fall by their revenues. With a modern stadium that brings in more than £100m ($126m) per year in matchday revenue alone (more on non-matchdays shortly), no wonder Daniel Levy has been so publicly supportive of the rules. In the era of PSR, these guaranteed revenues are invaluable.
In terms of how the stadium generates that money, a big part of it is from food and drink. The stadium is better equipped with bars than anywhere else in the league. With fans welcome to arrive early and stay late, the club can expect to bring in roughly £1million ($1.26m) per home game in food and drink revenue. (Which may sound like a lot, but is very little compared to what they would bring in for food and drink during an NFL game at the same stadium.) A big chunk of the revenue, of course, is tickets.
There is no avoiding the fact that going to watch Tottenham is expensive. Next season, adult season ticket prices will range from £856 to £2,367. Only Arsenal have a cheapest adult season ticket which is more expensive than at Spurs, given that the cheapest season ticket at the Emirates is a remarkable £1,073. While Tottenham had kept ticket prices relatively stable in the first few years at the new stadium, that delicate balance broke last month when the club announced a six per cent uplift in season ticket prices for 2024-25 and, even more controversially, a phased reduction in senior concession season ticket prices, and a bar on new senior concession season tickets.
Spurs fans were furious. The planned tifo in the south stand for Spurs’ home game against Manchester City, which is paid for and arranged by fans, was cancelled. “I think they’ve got the pricing wrong,” says Martin Buhagiar, chair of the Tottenham Hotspur Supporters Trust. “I don’t think there is a need for the club to make the money that they generate from ticket pricing. We’ve got a hashtag at the moment, #StopExploitingLoyalty. When you look at the amount of money that clubs pay for players, and spend on wages, to have season ticket prices put up six per cent, to bring in what we think is between £3.5m and £3.8m extra revenue, it just feels like the club have got their priorities wrong.”
Fans protest against ticket price rises outside Tottenham Hotspur Stadium (Clive Rose/Getty Images)
Even more unpopular than the six per cent rise was the change in concession prices. This has already prompted a ‘Save Our Seniors’ campaign from concerned Spurs fans, and when Spurs played at Craven Cottage in March there was a banner with that slogan in the away end. In the win against Luton Town on Saturday, many supporters in the ground turned their backs on the game in the 65th minute, to make their feelings known about the treatment of season-ticket holders over the age of 65.
Some fans had already been frustrated by the club’s concession policy, given that there are plenty of sections in the new stadium where there are no concession season tickets available at all. (It is not uncommon for clubs to limit the areas where concessions are available and many limit the areas more than Spurs do. The club see their new concessions policy as the only way to prevent further price increases and maintain ticket choice.)
This discussion speaks to the broader question that many have about the new ground, and what it means for the identity of the whole club. As much as they love the look of the stadium, the views, the atmosphere, the sense of being looked after, many fans still want that local family-friendly community feel, rather than simply being commoditised.
The football matches held at the stadium will only ever be a small part of the story. This season Spurs will only play 21 home games, due to their lack of European football and poor cup performances. (No one enjoyed last season but they did at least manage 24 home games.) But it does not make sense to have this special stadium sat empty and unused for 345 days per year. It needs to be filled even when Tottenham are not playing.
When Tottenham moved into their new home, it was more than a matter of simply up-sizing their bricks and mortar. It forced the club to take on a new identity. They were no longer merely a football club trying to win on the pitch. They had moved into a different world. Yes, this was still a football club, but a club that owned and operated one of London’s leading multi-purpose sports and entertainment venues.
At some other stadiums, the non-football events are run separately. Wembley is owned by the Football Association but non-football events are run by Wembley National Stadium Limited, an operating division of the FA. The London Stadium, where West Ham United are a tenant, has concerts and baseball but those are run by Stadium 185 and not by West Ham themselves. But at Tottenham, the club staff effectively run two calendars at once, one for the football teams, the other for non-football events.
So even before the stadium opened in 2019, Tottenham were working hard behind the scenes to find partners who could come and fill the stadium with their events. Central to this push was Simon Bamber, the club’s former commercial head who passed away in 2021. Bamber is credited by multiple sources as having the imagination and drive to land the partnerships that have enabled the success of the stadium.
The most important of those relationships, the one that made everything else possible, was with American football. NFL played its first London game at Wembley Stadium in 2007 and those first few years, playing one game there per season, were a huge success. But in July 2015, NFL signed a 10-year agreement with Tottenham Hotspur, to play their games in a stadium which was not even being built yet. It was a leap of faith for NFL, committing to a stadium that was always going to be smaller than Wembley, and in a less globally-known part of London. But they have been delighted with it: the stadium was given official status at the start of the season as the ‘Home of the NFL in the UK’.
There have so far been eight NFL matches at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium (Justin Setterfield/Getty Images)
Since opening — excepting 2020 due to Covid — the stadium has held two NFL games per year, generally in the Premier League international breaks in October As well as being huge for the global reach of the club, the games are money-spinners for the stadium too. NFL pay Tottenham a hire fee for every game, as part of the 10-year agreement. Then Tottenham will take a cut of the millions of pounds of food and drink revenue, roughly three times higher than it would be for a Spurs game. (The games last for four hours, fans can drink beer in their seats, and so people are buying food and drink throughout, rather than just before the game, during half-time, and afterwards.) Tottenham will also get a cut of the merchandise sold out of their club shop, again significantly higher than it would be for the Premier League.
Rugby union does not have the same global reach as NFL but Tottenham have a strong partnership with Saracens, hosting an annual Premiership game known as the ‘Showdown’. Again this was a partnership that Spurs had been working on since before the stadium even opened. There has also been rugby league and two huge boxing nights, with Anthony Joshua fighting Oleksandr Usyk in September 2021, and then Tyson Fury’s third bout with Derek Chisora, in December 2022.
But the stadium is for more than just sport. Perhaps the most significant development in recent years has been the use of the stadium as a concert venue, one to rival Wembley and the London Stadium for putting on the biggest artists. In 2022 it hosted two nights each of Lady Gaga and Guns N’ Roses, before at the end of last season having the biggest music event in the stadium’s history: five nights of Beyonce at the end of last season as part of her Renaissance world tour. Across the five nights, almost 240,000 fans came to watch.
This five-night run was lucrative for everyone involved. LiveNation was the UK promoter, so they sold the tickets and paid Tottenham a hire fee. (Tottenham could effectively act as an agent for the premium seats, keeping a cut of that revenue.). Tottenham would get a cut of the merchandise take and would also take all of the food and drink revenue, which would be expected to exceed £1m ($1.26m) per night. Industry estimates on how much Tottenham made from the concerts are as high as £15m ($19m) but the club say the final figure after costs was £5m ($6m).
Whatever the final figure, it is still money that other clubs would not be making after the end of their Premier League season. Last year fans protesting against Daniel Levy had a banner which said ‘ENIC DNA’ listing all of their complaints and while some of them were ‘ESL’ and ‘Expensive tickets’, the banner also included ‘NFL’ and ‘Lady Gaga’. And yet these events are crucial to boosting Tottenham’s revenues. Which, in the era of PSR, gives them an edge that other teams do not have. No wonder Spurs are about to apply to Haringey Council for the right to host more non-football events, hoping to increase the allowance from 16 to 30 per year.
It is unknown whether Lady Gaga had a pint of Neck Oil after the show (Samir Hussein/Getty Images for Live Nation )
These are still relatively early days for the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Given the time lost to the pandemic, it has not even been open for five full years yet. And there is plenty more to come. The stadium still carries the name it was born with and, for all the talk about a naming-rights deal, nothing has yet been agreed. Tottenham are committed to finding the right partner but it has not been easy with the pandemic and Brexit.
It is not just about the annual fee but the length of the deal, and while US venues tend to have long-term naming-rights deals of 20 to 30 years, that is less common in the UK market. (The O2 Arena was renewed in 2017 for a 10-year term.) Ultimately, Tottenham look at their commercial revenue collectively, and believe their success in other areas reduces the need for a naming-rights deal. The fact the stadium bears the name of the club has been good for the global brand too.
Last week Tottenham received approval for the new 30-storey hotel they are building next to the stadium on the small plot of land where Park Lane meets the High Road. The plan had been approved by Haringey Council in December and it is expected to be ready in time for Euro 2028, when the stadium will host games. With its distinctive tall, thin shape, the hotel will eventually tower over the Tottenham skyline. Even that will not be the end of the development work, with Tottenham planning more developments, including residential towers, on the land that they own next to the stadium.
The local area is already dominated by the stadium, and that sense will only increase when the glistening stadium is joined by even more new developments. For local businesses, it has been a success. Alex Tryfonos, joint-owner of the famous Chick King takeaway opposite the stadium, says that he is “a lot busier” than he was with the old ground, in part because he has so many customers coming to the stadium on non-matchdays. “It’s not just a football stadium now,” he says. “It’s an events place.”
Last year Ernst & Young wrote a report on the impact the stadium has had on the local ‘tri-borough area’ of Haringey, Enfield and Waltham Forest. In 2019-20, 26 per cent of children in that area were living in poverty. Haringey contains wards among the five per cent most deprived wards in England. The EY report says that Tottenham made a “£344m gross value added contribution” to the tri-borough area in 2021-22, supporting 3,700 jobs. With more events and more visitors expected, that figure is projected to rise to £585m contributed in the 2026-27 season. The Tottenham Hotspur Foundation works hard in the local community and has distributed over 11,000 complimentary tickets for events.
But for some, the fact that watching Tottenham Hotspur is so expensive sits awkwardly with the economic reality of the local area. “On the one hand, the club will talk about Haringey being very deprived and the fact the club is leading on regeneration,” says Buhagiar. “And on the other hand, the prices are among the highest in Europe. The juxtaposition just doesn’t work, it just doesn’t make sense.”
This is the challenge inherent in being a local club with a global reach. Moving into the new stadium changed Tottenham’s sense of who they were. And in the eyes of many, the appointments of Jose Mourinho in 2019 and Antonio Conte in 2021 pointed to a club too attached to the feeling of now being one of the big boys. Those decisions meant that the performance of the team in the last few years — finishing sixth, seventh, fourth and eighth since the stadium opened — has not been what was expected when the stadium opened. Nor was the fact that there has been no European football this season.
When the stadium opened, the hope was that it would help Tottenham to compete on the pitch and win trophies. Certainly, it has helped bring in more money to the club, and some of the recent purchases — Cristian Romero, Richarlison, Pedro Porro, James Maddison — are bigger players than Spurs could afford in the past. But good recruitment can only get you so far. Tottenham have learned this year that to get the feel they wanted at the new stadium they had to appoint a manager who fitted with the values of the old one.
(Artwork: Eamonn Dalton. Photos: Getty Images)
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