Tuesday will mark the fifth anniversary of the most important date in Tottenham Hotspur’s modern history. April 3, 2019: when Spurs finally played their first game at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
It took three years to build, but was almost two decades in the making. Since Daniel Levy took over as Tottenham chairman shortly after ENIC’s buyout in December 2000, he had three main ambitions: make the club competitive on the pitch, build a state-of-the-art training ground, build a world-leading stadium.
He and Spurs had already achieved two of these and now, after a gruelling, prolonged, hugely expensive process, they had finally pulled off the third. A remarkable achievement and the thing that would transform Tottenham’s finances and wider standing in the game.
The details of the build are well-documented. The delays, the rising costs (a £250million stadium ended up coming in at £1.2billion, or $1.5bn), the almost two seasons spent at Wembley — plus one home game played in Milton Keynes, almost 50 miles away. Then there was the infamous VIP Cheese Room, which was held up as a symbol of the stadium’s excess, but which Spurs denied was ever part of their plans.
Some of you may remember the chaos on the stadium site that saw one source tell Construction News that there were workers “off their heads, drinking cans first thing in the morning before going on to site and snorting coke in the toilets”. Mace, the company that delivered the construction of the stadium, rejected this characterisation at the time — and there was no suggestion it was informed of the instances of drinking and drugs, or failed to take action. Mace did not respond to a request for interview for this piece.
This is not an attempt to recount all that happened during the building process — there’s enough material there to fill a book.
Instead, in part one of a two-part series on the stadium, The Athletic will look at how the build affected those within the club and changed the way it operated — hearing from those who experienced it first-hand, mostly speaking anonymously to protect relationships.
Anniversary certainly feels like an appropriate word for the milestone coming up. Multiple people who were there for the grand opening describe it as being like a wedding day: “Years of build-up, then over in a flash.”
Katrina Law and Martin Cloake were the Tottenham Hotspur Supporters’ Trust (THST) co-chairs for the stadium opening and build. The previous few years had seen the trust help relocate fans to Wembley, engage in discussions and disputes with the club over ticketing at the new stadium, and reject the idea of playing in Stratford or Milton Keynes. It had been a tumultuous period.
“We were honestly beside ourselves,” Law remembers, reflecting the jubilant mood of the Spurs fans in attendance for the opening match against Crystal Palace. “We were up on a balcony and thousands of people were there hours before kick-off. It was so exciting and emotional.”
Tottenham’s first night at their new home was emotional (Michael Regan/Getty Images)
Part of the emotion came from thinking about the people who should have been there. Darren Alexander, the former THST co-chair, had died in 2014, while Jonathan Waite, Tottenham’s supporter liaison officer who had been heavily involved in the stadium build, passed away four years later.
“We were thinking back because Darren had led the trust when it looked like we might be moving to east London,” Cloake says. “We’d been on quite a journey.”
The club’s manager at the time, Mauricio Pochettino, felt similarly emotional as he heard the fans’ roar from his office while preparing to head out onto the pitch. Levy had tears in his eyes as he watched the opening ceremony.
Paul Coyte, the stadium’s on-pitch announcer, remembers feeling excited and nervous as he said to the nearly 60,000 fans in attendance: “We’re home, we’re back home.”
Five years on, he says: “The noise from the South Stand was what struck me. We’d never heard that noise. That was when you could really feel it.”
“It was unreal,” Law says. “There was a huge sense of pride that it was the best stadium in the world. The views from all the seats were amazing, and there were lots of lovely nods to White Hart Lane. It felt like we were entering a new era and this would propel us on. I remember saying, ‘The giant has awoken’.”
Not everyone felt so triumphant. “The first game you were just pleased it was over,” says one source involved in the process, pointing to how exhausting the years leading up to April 2019 had been.
Others say it was a bruising period when the stresses and strains were almost overwhelming at times. It’s hard to overstate just how all-encompassing the stadium build was — it dominated all areas of the club and only became more stressful as the delays went on. “Totally insane”; “Absolutely ridiculous”; “I’ve never worked so hard,” are some of the ways people who were there describe it. Those leading the project have said there were periods when they hardly slept.
The plan had originally been for the stadium to be ready for the game against Liverpool in September 2018. When it became clear that issues with critical safety systems meant this wouldn’t be possible, and the publicity around the build became increasingly negative, the atmosphere internally became increasingly tetchy. There was a particular fear of leaks to the press, not helped by stories like the one in Construction News in September 2018 that painted a picture of a dysfunctional building operation, including those reports of “a minority of workers being under the influence of alcohol and, in some cases, cocaine while working on the project”.
Tina Chisholm, who runs the Coach and Horses on Tottenham High Road, used to host some of the workers regularly at her pub. She laughs as she tells a story from that period: “One time a few of them came here for lunch and they got caught drinking. They got slung out of the ground and told they couldn’t work that afternoon. So they just stayed here drinking all day!”
The building site chaos was extreme, almost comical, but internally at Tottenham, there was a frenzied feeling too. In that summer 2017 to April 2019 period, Spurs were trying to be competitive in the Premier League and Champions League, and attempting to satisfy fans and commercial partners at their temporary home of Wembley, all while navigating a hugely ambitious stadium build that also involved challenges such as selling the naming rights. Everyone was under huge pressure — around 35,000 people logged on each day to watch live footage of the build.
Spurs did not secure a naming rights partner before the stadium opened, but they did have positive talks with several significant companies during this period. Part of the challenge was selling the vision of the stadium while it was still a building site — but even so, there was plenty of interest. Tottenham’s position has always been that it has to be the right partner and that commercial revenues are viewed as a whole on the balance sheet.
There were tragedies, including the death of Waite, the club’s hugely popular SLO, in November 2018. No wonder the build took a toll on people then and in the aftermath. Everyone was proud to be involved in such a big project, but some felt their non-stop work hadn’t been properly appreciated. Many left in the years that followed, with some feeling like they had little left to give — though the Covid-19 pandemic and the club’s handling of it was a big factor in this as well (Spurs’ position remains that they were trying to protect jobs).
The Covid-19 pandemic struck less than a year after the stadium opened (Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)
Spurs were changing. It is estimated that from 2014 to 2022, Tottenham grew from a company employing around 250 people to 700. The new stadium was a symbol of Tottenham’s transformation from an upwardly mobile Premier League club to one with global ambitions and very different revenues and outgoings.
It would be wrong, though, to characterise the stadium build as a negative process or experience. Some who were involved look back fondly at how energising and exciting it was to be part of something so ambitious and challenging. Others point to the “entrepreneurial” spirit the club had at that time, led by Levy, who was a force of nature throughout the period and oversaw everything, including the smallest details. Spurs was a much leaner organisation back then, as those staff numbers indicate, with almost a start-up feel in how the new stadium was built.
The re-opening of the Corner Pin is a good example of the club’s entrepreneurial spirit back then. The pub had closed in 2010 and been used by the club as a ticket office until 2020 — but Spurs partnered with local brewery Beavertown, which also operates a microbrewery in the stadium’s South Stand, to reopen the pub three years ago in a more modern guise. Craft beer hadn’t really existed in big British stadiums before, let alone in an on-site brewery, but it has been a very successful venture. If people had good ideas they could run with them.
One of those people was Simon Bamber, who oversaw the club’s commercial operations during this period, and was described by Tottenham after his death in 2021 as “an integral part of delivering the stadium”. Bamber led a team that laid the foundations for the stadium becoming what it is today — managing the relationships around concerts, the NFL, European rugby and others that have helped make it the 365-day-a-year venue that Levy always envisioned.
And the stadium was absolutely Levy’s vision. When assessing the legacy of the build, so much of it comes back to the Spurs chairman.
In many ways, it encompasses the central debates around him. Is he the unrelenting visionary who saw through the build despite no handouts from the taxpayer or backing from a nation-state? Or the micromanager who was so on top of the stadium detail that he obsessed over what the toilets should look like, and was recently described as “maybe driving our architects to distraction”?
The reality is that those two things are not mutually exclusive. Levy achieved his vision largely because of his absolute dedication to making sure everything about the build was top-quality and unique. Some involved suggest Levy didn’t micromanage as much as has been made out.
Nothing was decided without his approval, even though there was also a project team, headed by Andrew Downs. Levy was exacting in his standards and pushed everyone to make every part of the stadium better than they had seen elsewhere.
Every Tuesday, he would have a day-long meeting with the stadium project team and once a week, he walked the stadium, checking it personally. He regularly looked at the camera footage monitoring the construction, zooming in to inspect why things were not ready yet.
Daniel Levy would regularly visit the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium during the building process (Adam Davy/PA Images via Getty Images)
“His attention to detail was something else,” as one source puts it — born of a need for every element of the stadium to reflect well on the club, and to satisfy the demands of Haringey Council.
It wasn’t just small details that Levy managed — he could see the bigger picture too and some of the stadium’s most distinctive features were a product of his refusal to settle for anything run of the mill. In 2013, for instance, he brought in architect Populous to rethink KSS’s original design because he thought more could be done to make the new stadium more distinct.
He subsequently pushed for the unique design of the South Stand, and when Populous had a plan for the connecting bridge between Lilywhite House and the stadium as a fairly normal enclosed glass bridge, Levy wanted something aesthetically and architecturally different. Hence the ‘twisted’ look that Populous eventually came up with. Levy also very carefully managed the relationship with the architect F3, which designed some of the most creative elements of the stadium, including the home dressing room and media area (as well as the training ground).
Internally, some became frustrated by Levy’s exacting standards, and one view is that the chairman contributed to the delays by questioning everything. Others say that without Levy’s energy and determination, it would have dragged on even longer.
Levy’s way of working is to set a very tight deadline, appreciating that if it runs slightly over that is better than meeting one that is more achievable but a lot further out.
In the case of the stadium, those with knowledge of the construction industry always felt that summer 2018 was an unrealistic aim for completion — something that again comes back to Levy.
In projects of this size, the owner can choose to pay more for a construction company to deliver the scheme to a fixed price, which leaves the latter making up the difference if the cost overruns. That was not the case here, with Levy saying in his programme notes for the Crystal Palace game that no construction company would commit to a fixed price for the stadium build, so “we have ended up taking all the risk and pain ourselves”. This left Levy and his team as effectively the project managers, meaning more work for them and a greater role in driving the bespoke aspects of the stadium. In theory, it meant scope for them to drive down costs themselves, but it also left Spurs with more risk and, ultimately, a bigger bill.
The period when the stadium’s opening was being delayed also gives an insight into the dynamics of Spurs at the very top.
One source who looked around the stadium weeks before it was scheduled to open against Liverpool in September 2018, felt that the timeline was so unrealistic that it suggested Levy had too much power over the project. “Clearly, it wasn’t going to be ready but everyone you spoke to was telling you the probability was that it was going to open,” the source told The Athletic in 2020. “I would describe it as ‘the cult of Daniel’. Everyone knew this wasn’t going to be completed in time but it was basically like King Canute or the Emperor’s New Clothes. Nobody would turn around to him and say, ‘This isn’t going to be ready’.”
Similarly, some staff remember walking around the stadium a few months before its supposed opening in September 2018 and sharing this view that it wouldn’t be ready, but not wanting to say anything. As a counter, operations and finance director Matthew Collecott said in 2019 that during the stadium build he, Levy and executive director Donna-Maria Cullen “had the benefit of being able to be fairly rude to each other! We’ve known each other for 20-odd years, so we can be really honest”.
On their public bullishness that a September 2018 completion date remained possible, Spurs’ felt they had no choice. To say anything else could have led to the contractors easing off.
In any case, the delays had other effects — leading to resentment among some of the players.
“When I felt we were most capable of winning a trophy, we had to move to Wembley,” the club captain at the time Hugo Lloris told The Athletic last month. “The year before at White Hart Lane, we won 17 games and drew two. We thought if we stayed we could match that.”
Spurs hosted Lionel Messi’s Barcelona at Wembley in 2018 (Mike Egerton/PA Images via Getty Images)
Meanwhile, the club’s supporters, who had largely stomached playing at Wembley for a year, became increasingly restless during the second season away from Tottenham.
In that 2018-19 campaign, they even had to play one ‘home’ League Cup tie against Watford in Milton Keynes, with Wembley unavailable. The October 2018 match against Manchester City at Wembley was played a day after an NFL game, with the American football markings still visible. Fans ultimately voted with their feet, with attendances falling from a peak of more than 85,000 in 2016 when Spurs played their European games at Wembley to below 30,000 for the January 2019 league game against Watford.
Generally, the Wembley experience is not viewed as universally negative by those who lived through it. Many feel that the period there acted as a bridge to the new stadium, helping Spurs understand what it took to manage operations at such a big ground. There were a few members of Tottenham staff permanently based at Wembley, and nearly tripling the capacity from White Hart Lane meant Spurs could attract more fans and host a more international audience, while delivering matchdays in a very different way. This all exposed the business to a different hospitality offering, much more like the new stadium would be than the far more basic White Hart Lane.
Wembley was where Spurs learned how to operate a mega-stadium and run matchdays as major events, like the 3-1 win over Real Madrid in November 2017. There were new protocols and those that were there say it shifted the club’s mindset.
Many of the players also grew to like playing at Wembley and for Pochettino, it cemented his role as the second-most important person at the club after Levy.
Numerous sources felt that Levy was less hands-on when it came to the football side during this period because he was so laser-focused on the stadium. Many appreciated the greater autonomy this left Pochettino with, and it coincided with Tottenham emerging as a major player in the Champions League — reaching the knockouts in both seasons away from White Hart Lane, the second of which ended at the new stadium and the final in Madrid. The Spurs view is that football decisions have always been taken by the football management group.
Either way, Pochettino still felt frustrated at being away from White Hart Lane, and it’s a credit to him that he managed to hold everything together on the football side. He and everyone connected with Spurs will always wonder whether they could have won the Premier League in this period without the inconvenience of playing their home games away from Tottenham.
Even as April 2019 drew closer, there was still a huge amount of work to be done. Before the final two test events — an under-18s match against Southampton and a legends game against Inter Milan — there were about a dozen other test events, including a Super Bowl party in the NFL Lounge with club legends Clive Allen and Darren Anderton, to check the safety systems in every area.
The safety team found issues from the test events and had to make sure they were all sorted and signed off for the opening. They worked overnight, knowing that there was no margin for error. The test events also threw up other lessons, such as the huge volume of food and drink people wanted to consume, and how popular the Beavertown beer was. Spurs were realising that they were transitioning from being just a football club to something bigger.
With all the safety checks done, Spurs were finally ready to return home. Before the match against Palace, fans marvelled at some of the touches at the new ground that nodded to White Hart Lane, like the old programmes on the walls, the historical pictures hanging up, the bricks from the original east stand “shelf” that were now part of The Shelf bar.
Spurs beat Palace 2-0 and the stadium was extremely well received, but there was barely a moment for those involved to pause and congratulate themselves. There was still so much work to be done — operationally, commercially and, most importantly, ensuring the players had the best platform to succeed on the pitch.
The stadium build wasn’t an end in itself — it was a means to help take Tottenham to the next level.
As next week’s piece will look at, the last five years suggest the stadium has been a mixed bag in that regard.
(Top photos: English Heritage/Heritage Images/Getty Images)
Read the full article here