Wembley Stadium


Wembley Stadium, currently branded as Wembley Stadium connected by EE for sponsorship reasons, is an association football stadium in Wembley, London, England. It opened in 2007 on the site of the original Wembley Stadium, which had stood from 1923 until 2003. The stadium is England's national football stadium, and thus hosts the majority of the England national team home matches and the FA Cup Final – the final of England's primary domestic club football competition. It is considered one of the most well known football stadiums in the world, and is considered a hub for the English game. Wembley Stadium is owned by the governing body of English football, the Football Association, whose headquarters are in the stadium, through its subsidiary Wembley National Stadium Ltd. With 90,000 seats, it is the largest stadium in the UK and the second-largest stadium in Europe, behind Barcelona's Camp Nou.
Designed by Populous and Foster and Partners, the stadium is crowned by the Wembley Arch which serves aesthetically as a landmark across London as well as structurally, with the arch supporting over 75% of the entire roof load. The stadium was built by Australian firm Multiplex at a cost of £798 million. Two partially retractable roof structures over the east and west ends of the stadium can be opened to allow sunlight and aid pitch growth.
In addition to England home games and the FA Cup final, the stadium also hosts other major games in English football, including the season-opening FA Community Shield, the finals of lower tiered cup competition – the FA Trophy, the FA Vase, finals of the EFL Cup and EFL Trophy, the FA Cup semi-finals, and the promotion play-off finals of the tiers two, three, four, and five of the English football league system. The stadium also hosts the Women's FA Cup finals and an increasing number of home games of the England women's national football team.
A UEFA category four stadium, Wembley hosted the 2011, 2013 and the 2024 Champions League Finals, eight games at UEFA Euro 2020, and hosted the final of the UEFA Women's Euro 2022. The stadium hosted the gold-medal matches at the 2012 Olympic Games football tournament. The stadium also hosts the Rugby Football League's Challenge Cup, Women's Challenge Cup, and 1895 Cup finals, in addition to various music concerts. The stadium also hosts NFL London Games and was the temporary home of Premier League football club Tottenham Hotspur between August 2017 and March 2019, while White Hart Lane was being demolished and their new stadium was constructed. Wembley has also been chosen as one of the host stadia for UEFA Euro 2028.
In 2014, Wembley Stadium entered into a six-year sponsorship agreement with mobile provider EE Limited, under which it provides technology and infrastructure services for the venue. Under the agreement, the facility is officially referred to as "Wembley Stadium connected by EE". The deal was renewed in 2019 and again in 2025 for a further four years, through to 2028.

Stadium

Wembley was designed by architects Foster + Partners and HOK Sport and with engineers Mott Stadium Consortium, who were a collection of three structural engineering consultants in the form of Mott MacDonald, Sinclair Knight Merz and Aurecon. The design of the building services was carried out by Mott MacDonald. The construction of the stadium was managed by Australian company Multiplex and funded by Sport England, WNSL, the Football Association, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and the London Development Agency. It is one of the most expensive stadia ever built at a cost of £798 million in 2007, and has the largest roof-covered seating capacity in the world. Nathaniel Lichfield and Partners was appointed to assist Wembley National Stadium Limited in preparing the scheme for a new stadium and to obtain planning and listed building permission for the development.
The all-seater stadium is a bowl design with a capacity of 90,000, protected from the elements by a sliding roof that does not completely enclose it. The stadium's signature feature is a circular section lattice arch of 7 m internal diameter with a 315 m span, erected some 22° off true, and rising to 133 m. It supports all the weight of the north roof and 60% of the weight of the retractable roof on the southern side. The arch is the world's longest unsupported roof structure.
A platform system was designed in order to temporarily convert the stadium to athletics use, but its use would decrease the stadium's capacity to approximately 60,000. No athletics events have taken place at the stadium; the conversion for athletics use was a condition of part of the lottery funding the stadium received, but to convert it would take weeks of work and cost millions of pounds. Instead, with the awarding of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games to London in 2005, the London Olympic Stadium has been used for major athletics events since 2012.

Construction

The initial plan for the reconstruction of Wembley Stadium was for demolition to begin before Christmas 2000, and for the new stadium to be completed some time during 2003, but this work was delayed by a succession of financial and legal difficulties. In 2004, London Mayor Ken Livingstone and Brent Council also announced wider plans for the regeneration of Wembley, taking in the arena and the surrounding areas as well as the stadium, to be implemented over two or three decades. Demolition officially began on 30 September 2002, with the Twin Towers being dismantled in December 2002.
Delays to the construction project started as far back as 2003. In December 2003, the constructors of the arch, subcontractors Cleveland Bridge & Engineering Company of Darlington, warned Multiplex about rising costs. Cleveland Bridge withdrew from the project and were replaced by Dutch firm Hollandia, with all the attendant problems of starting over. 2004 also saw errors, most notably a fatal accident involving carpenter Patrick O'Sullivan for which construction firm PC Harrington Contractors were fined £150,000 in relation to breaches of health and safety laws.
In October 2005, Sports Minister Richard Caborn announced: "They say the Cup Final will be there, barring six feet of snow or something like that". By November 2005, WNSL were still hopeful of a handover date of 31 March, in time for the cup final on 13 May. However, in December 2005, the builders admitted that there was a "material risk" that the stadium might not be ready in time for the final. In February 2006 these worries were confirmed, with the FA moving the game to Cardiff's Millennium Stadium.
On 20 March 2006, a steel rafter in the roof of the new development fell by, forcing 3,000 workers to evacuate the stadium and raising further doubts over the completion date which was already behind schedule. On 23 March 2006, sewers beneath the stadium buckled due to ground movement. GMB Union leader Steve Kelly said that the problem had been caused by the pipes not being properly laid, and that the repair would take months. A spokesman for developers Multiplex said that they did not believe this would "have any impact on the completion of the stadium", which was then scheduled to be completed on 31 March 2006.
On 30 March 2006, the developers announced that Wembley Stadium would not be ready until 2007. All competitions and concerts planned were to be moved to suitable locations. On 19 June 2006, it was announced that the turf had been laid. On 19 October 2006 it was announced that the venue was now set to open in early 2007 after the dispute between the Football Association and Multiplex had finally been settled. WNSL was expected to pay around £36m to Multiplex, on top of the amount of the original fixed-price contract. The total cost of the project was estimated to be £1 billion.
For the new stadium the level of the pitch was lowered. During excavation of the new playing field, mechanical diggers unearthed a buried obstruction: the concrete foundations of Watkin's Tower, a failed attempt to construct a rival to the Eiffel Tower in London. Only the base of the tower was ever built before being abandoned and demolished in 1907; the site was later used as the location for the first Wembley Stadium.

Handover and opening

The new stadium was completed and handed over to the FA on 9 March 2007. The official Wembley Stadium website had announced that the stadium would be open for public viewing for local residents of Brent on 3 March 2007, however this was delayed by two weeks and instead happened on 17 March.
While the stadium had hosted football matches since the handover in March, the stadium was officially opened on Saturday 19 May, with the staging of the 2007 FA Cup Final. Eight days before that on Friday 11 May, the statue of Bobby Moore had been unveiled by his former England team-mate Sir Bobby Charlton outside the stadium entrance, as the "finishing touch" to the completion of the stadium. The twice life-size bronze statue, sculpted by Philip Jackson, depicts England's 1966 World Cup winning captain Bobby Moore, looking down Olympic Way.

Structure

  • The stadium contains 2,618 toilets, more than any other venue in the world.
  • The stadium has a circumference of.
  • The bowl volume is listed at, somewhat smaller than the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, but with a greater seating capacity.
  • At its peak, there were more than 3,500 construction workers on site.
  • 4,000 separate piles form the foundations of the new stadium, the deepest of which is.
  • There are of heavy-duty power cables in the stadium.
  • of concrete and of steel were used in the construction of the new stadium.
  • The total length of the escalators is.
  • The arch has a cross-sectional diameter greater than that of a cross-channel Eurostar train.

    Pitch

The pitch size, as lined for association football, is long by wide, slightly narrower than the old Wembley, as required by the UEFA stadium categories for a category four stadium, the top category.
In a period after the completion of the new Wembley, the pitch came into disrepute. It was described as being "no good" and "not in the condition that Wembley used to be known for" by Slaven Bilić before a game between England and the team he managed, Croatia, in November 2007. The pitch was cut up during the game, which was blamed by some as the reason England did not qualify for UEFA Euro 2008. The Football Association admitted in April 2009, after the FA Cup semi-finals, that improvements were needed to the Wembley pitch, after criticism of the surface by coaches Alex Ferguson, Arsène Wenger and David Moyes.
In March 2010, the surface was relaid for the tenth time since opening. In April 2010, the pitch was again criticised following the FA Cup semi-finals, during which the players found it difficult to keep their footing and the surface cut up despite the dry conditions. The then Tottenham Hotspur boss, Harry Redknapp, labelled it a "disgrace" after his side's semi-final defeat to Portsmouth. After the 2010 FA Cup Final, Chelsea captain John Terry said: "The pitch ruined the final. It's probably the worst pitch we've played on all year. It was not good enough for a Wembley pitch." The stadium was then relaid with a Desso GrassMaster semi-artificial pitch, ahead of the 2010 community shield game between Chelsea and Manchester United. Michael Owen, who previously criticised the pitch for causing him injury, said that it was much improved.
In 2023, the stadium switched to a carpet lay and play system.
Wembley has been used for American football matches in the National Football League's International Series. Tottenham Hotspur hosted Manchester City in a Premier League match on 29 October 2018, a day after Wembley hosted the Philadelphia Eagles and Jacksonville Jaguars. Due to the short turnaround, faded gridiron markings and the NFL logo were clearly visible on the pitch along with worn grass along the centre of the pitch and the touch-lines. Tottenham were forced to hold the match at Wembley due to construction delays to their new ground. Despite the pitch's condition, UEFA allowed a Champions League leg to be played at Wembley on 6 November 2018 with Tottenham hosting Dutch side PSV Eindhoven.