Wembley Stadium undergoes a £750m renovation, but could it be too big a change for some older fans?
Packed in like sardines, passengers provided no room to spare on the tube carriage from Baker Street. Yet amongst the sweat and stuffiness, there was a more important concern at hand: getting the first glimpse of the new £750m home of English football.
At the end of Wembley Way sat our destination, a fortress dominating the suburban skyline. The twin towers were gone, but the arch cast an impressive authority over those who ambled beneath it.
Wembley Way had a carnival atmosphere to it, as you would expect with an FA Cup final. A vendor offered to paint my face. Large banners read ‘Welcome home.’ Stalls aligned the walk towards the stadium, selling programmes at £10 each, an absurd price the FA got away with as the clamour for souvenirs reached full swing.
Entering the stadium is a bizarre exercise in its own right, more akin to entering an airport than a football ground. Security, escalators, more security—if you were to wake up inside, you could be forgiven for thinking you had somehow stumbled into Heathrow.
Then there was the infamous food. The programmes had been an early warning of things to come as fans were made to fork out £8 for burger meals. Even the staple of the football fanatic - the meat pie, at a whopping £4 - was more than double what one would be expected to pay at an average premiership ground. The final insult of paying all this money was that the food was actually quite disappointing.
I couldn’t help but think I was a victim of a scheme to counter the grossly over-budgeted costs of the stadium. I had already dug deep for my £90 ticket, but that wasn’t going to stop the powers-that-be from squeezing every last drop of disposable income out of me. Call me cynical, but on what was supposed to be a great day, it was a sad reminder that football is a fully-fledged business, with profits taking priority over fans.
Some of these frustrations were forgotten when it was time to take our seats. A silence seized each individual as they gazed into Wembley’s vastness for the first time. But the silence was swiftly broken by singing and banter—it was, after all, a Cup final.
Yet soon we all became aware of another problem that will haunt the new Wembley. The entire middle tier was comprised mainly of ‘suits’, corporate boxes and Club Wembley patrons. How the FA can justify only allocating 25,000 tickets each to Manchester United and Chelsea when the match is taking place in a 90,0000-capacity stadium is beyond ludicrous. Nearly 40,000 people inside Wembley were non-fans, which was greatly detrimental to the atmosphere and the occasion itself.
Nevertheless, the aura surrounding Wembley is not to be understated. On that day, the spectators came away feeling inspired, mainly because they had been there at the start of a new era, a new dawn for English sport. But is this what we all wanted? With the iconic twin towers gone, so was the historical context of a Wembley Cup final. The banners may have read ‘Welcome home,’ but it didn’t feel like home - rather like the bigger, more attractive brother of Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium.
Members of the older generation were further disgruntled by the complex of modernity in which they were sitting. The fan sitting next to me could recall England’s 1966 World Cup triumph and boxer Henry Cooper’s left-handed punch that knocked down a then rising star named Cassius Clay.
“The fact is,” he said, “the towers are gone, we’re in a new stadium built by Australians, watching a tournament sponsored by Germans and being played by two teams made up mostly of foreigners, and they’re saying welcome home? Doesn’t feel like it, if I’m honest.”
Andrew Fenichel
