Taylor Swift concerts and ‘lay and play' pitches – has Wembley finally become a financial asset for English football?

New York Times

17 hours ago

Seven years ago, before he spent £350million on a private members' club with a view of a football pitch, Fulham owner Shahid Khan tried to buy the most famous pitch in the world.
The American billionaire's audacious and unsolicited offer for Wembley Stadium was £600million ($813m at current exchange rates) up front and £300m in future revenues from the venue's lucrative prawn-sandwich-brigade business.
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Close to £1billion, then, which was about what the 90,000-capacity stadium cost to build, if you include all the financing costs.
Of course, if he were only offering the English Football Association (FA) its money back on Wembley, their negotiations would have been brief. But when Khan made his move, the FA subsidiary that runs the venue had lost nearly £200million over two decades. It was also facing a maintenance bill of more than £70m, so Wembley was hardly the cash cow the project's cheerleaders had promised in the 1990s when the FA bought the site's old stadium so it could knock down its twin towers and build a modern, multi-purpose money-spinner.
But by 2018, English football's governing body had been in the venue-management game for long enough to know two things: a) it is hard to make money at a stadium that is neither in use by a team every other week nor a regular stop on every touring band's schedule, and b) owning the country's best ground is a bad look when millions of amateurs and youngsters have to play on a decreasing number of poorly-kept pitches that flood and/or freeze in winter and become rutted crusts in spring.
So, for an organisation struggling to find the money needed to make English football's grassroots facilities green and pleasant once more, Khan's offer was timely and tempting.
After all, he was not threatening to knock down Wembley again, or stop using it for England games, cup finals, the play-offs, rugby league matches, boxing events and anything else he could squeeze in, including almost certainly more visits from his other team, the NFL's Jacksonville Jaguars. The FA, like almost every other football federation on the planet, would simply become a tenant of the largest stadium in the land, not its owner-operator.
It is little wonder then that those who knew the numbers best, namely the FA board and its senior management team, thought this was a great idea, a view shared by many in the UK government, including the sports minister and Sport England, the public body that funds amateur sport around the country.
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But football, as we all know, is an emotional game and the debate about whether to sell Wembley became a six-month war of words between those who saw this as a business decision to be taken rationally and those who viewed it as a test of patriotism.
The latter opinion was personified by serial club owner Ken Bates, who told UK radio station Talksport that he initially thought Khan's proposal was 'a joke', that the FA lacked the 'moral authority' to sell Wembley as it belongs to all England fans, for generations to come, and that if it was really worried about grassroots facilities, it should ask the Premier League to pay for them.
Yeah, his arguments became less cogent as he went on. Not that it really mattered, as enough people agreed that selling Wembley was tantamount to treason.
The board had told Khan it would do the deal if it could get at least 60 per cent of the strange brew of executives from professional football and volunteer administrators from the amateur side on its 127-strong council to back the idea. But with the game's self-styled parliament split, FA chief executive Martin Glenn was forced to admit the proposal was 'more divisive than anticipated' and Khan pulled out, citing the absence of a 'definitive mandate'.
Glenn would soon quit the FA, although he is now chair of the Football Foundation, the grassroots facilities charity that would have received and distributed most of Khan's cash, and the Pakistan-born U.S. autoparts magnate moved on. Neither he nor anyone else has tried to buy Wembley again.
But what if somebody had? Would the FA have sold? Was the decision to leave Khan's offer on the table a failure of leadership or a lucky escape?
The official line is that Wembley is making money now — an operating profit for Wembley National Stadium Limited (WNSL) of just over £30million in 2024 contributed to a healthy overall profit for the FA of just under £50m — and will make even more in the future, largely thanks to the 2023 decision to stop growing its pitches from grass seed in the stadium and instead bring in huge rolls of hybrid grass/plastic turf grown hundreds of miles away.
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Known as 'lay and play', this solution to the problem of having to grow a new pitch every time you take a break from football to put on some concerts has significantly increased the number of large events Wembley can stage each summer. As the FA's head of grounds and surface transitions, Karl Standley, explained to The Athletic last month, he can now rip up an old pitch, roll out a new one and get it mowed and marked up for play all within four days.
Last September, the FA gained permission from Brent Council, Wembley's local authority, to increase the number of large, or 'full bowl', events it can host every year from 46 to 54. Large is defined as anything with a capacity higher than 60,000, and Wembley is hosting 41 of those this year. It can host events with a capacity of 59,999 or fewer every day of the week, if it likes.
The pitch Standley's crew laid this winter will get one more use on Saturday, when Hull Kingston Rovers play Warrington Wolves in rugby league's Challenge Cup final, before Wembley's staff switch into their summer uniforms for 12 nights of music, punctuated by the Oleksandr Usyk vs Daniel Dubois heavyweight boxing bill in mid-July. A second pitch of the year will be delivered for Liverpool vs Crystal Palace in the Community Shield, set to be played on August 10, only to be ripped up for 10 nights of Coldplay and two more helpings of the Oasis reunion whip-round.
Come October, a third pitch will arrive for England men's friendly against Wales, the Jaguars' annual visit (Khan is still a fan of Wembley's 90,000 seats) and an England-Australia rugby league game, with November's England vs Serbia World Cup qualifier bringing the curtain down on what promises to be an even better year financially than 2024's Taylor Swift-powered profit after tax of £28million.
Surely that means player-turned-property developer Gary Neville was right in 2018 when he said, 'Whatever you do, don't sell Wembley', right?
Yes… and no. It is a little complicated, but that 2024 profit followed a £66million loss a year earlier. While the revenues were higher than in 2023, so were the costs, but the real difference between the two sets of numbers was an impairment charge of £46m in 2023 that was reversed in 2024.
In accounting, an impairment is made when a company's directors believe the market value of an asset has fallen below its book value. For an asset as complicated as Wembley, with a large and lucrative premium-ticket offering, that assessment is very sensitive to interest-rate movements, the state of the economy, how well England's teams are playing and which music stars are coming to town in the summer.
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If we ignore the 2023 impairment and the 2024 reversal, as they cancel each other out, we are left with a business that lost £38million over two years. This is a big improvement from the kick in the shins that was Covid-19, a vindication for the move to 'lay and play', which is not cheap, and confirmation that the corporate tagline of 'It means more at Wembley' might be more than just marketing babble.
It does not mean Wembley is actually making real money for the FA, however. Not when you include all of WNSL's costs, such as depreciation, intra-company loans and the wages of the hundreds of FA staff who support the stadium company's work. But it is definitely getting close to breaking even and may, with a fair economic wind and a few more mega-star residencies, actually become the net contributor it was built to be.
Speaking to journalists in March, Mark Bullingham, who replaced Glenn as CEO in 2019, explained how the FA had used the pre-grown pitches and increased major-event cap to grow Wembley's revenues. He also said WNSL had started charging tour promoters for every day they have access to the stadium as opposed to just the day of the actual show. He said that has incentivised them to book multiple nights, not one-offs, which is something a venue can only do from a position of strength, another testament to the work being done by the 80-strong events team.
There is a certain irony that when Khan made his offer, Wembley was turning a small profit thanks to a residency that went on much longer than anyone initially expected: Tottenham Hotspur's near two-season stay at the stadium while they built their £1billion new home.
That venue has 27,000 fewer seats than Wembley but has become the FA's only real rival as the London stop on a global stadium tour. The publicly-owned London Stadium, West Ham United's home ground, has six events this summer, including the world's largest chicken-wing festival and two nights of Metallica; the Allianz Stadium in Twickenham, the home of English rugby union, was originally booked for a night of K-pop stars this month but ticket sales were so poor it has moved across town to the much-smaller O2 Arena indoor venue; Arsenal's Emirates Stadium has two nights of Robbie Williams.
Spurs, on the other hand, have 18 concerts this summer, including a six-date stint by Beyonce, plus two NFL games in October. It has already hosted a sold-out rugby union match and a big night of British boxing this year.
Asked if their former tenants had stolen any of Wembley's business, Bullingham said: 'Not that we've seen, no.
'We do compete sometimes for the music acts but, as a result of live streaming and music acts needing to make a lot more money from live performances, we've seen a growth in that market over the last few years, and we've definitely benefited from that. And we have the advantage that a lot of music acts want to play at Wembley because it's a big status symbol for them.'
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Paul Smyth, Wembley Stadium's general manager, agrees.
'We haven't necessarily stolen a march on them, but we've got 90,000 seats,' he explained. 'Tottenham have found a really good spot that is north of The O2's capacity (around 20,000), but south of ours. Obviously, you could make more money at Wembley, but a promoter has to make sure the shows sell out — it's damaging for an artist to play a venue that's too big for them.'
Smyth, who started in the FA's ticketing team 20 years ago, was speaking to The Athletic in April, a few hours before Wembley opened its doors for the first of this season's FA Cup semi-finals, between Palace and Aston Villa.
'Ultimately, our commercial opportunity exists in the live-events season — we already do all of the football,' he said, matter-of-factly.
'We used to finish the concerts in the first weekend in July, because that's when we used to grow the pitch from seed. We'd then have the Community Shield and just move on into the rest of our sports season. We now run right into the first weekend in August and can have a concert on one Saturday night and football the following weekend.
'Last year, Taylor Swift did two shows before the Community Shield, as well as AC/DC and the rest, we then converted back into a football ground, played 90 minutes of football and killed the pitch six hours later. And that will happen every year going forward.
'Next year is even busier. More events, more sport, things like the (Khan-owned) All Elite Wrestling we've had the last two years, the Jaguars and as many Lionesses (England's women's football team) games as we can. We'll do 44 large events this year, 25 concerts plus the football, but it will be closer to 50 next year, with a 60/40 split on non-football and football events.'
Smyth explained that one way to fit more events in is to book younger artists rather than 'legacy' (aka, older) ones.
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'Some of the artists we've got next year are relatively condensed in the number of nights they're doing,' he said. 'They will do consecutive nights, which means we can crowbar another act into the window. But if you had a legacy act, the kind that does the Sunday slot at Glastonbury, they may need three days off between shows.
'But you'll get some bands who just want a night off after each show because they've been on the road for a year. It's not that they can't do back-to-back, they've just earned the right for a night off.'
This is a point I have tried to make to my bosses, but it seems I have not reached the status of 'Legends' slot at Glastonbury Festival yet.
'What sets us apart is the iconic nature and status of the stadium itself,' added Smyth. 'But that's only one part of it. We want to be the best, the most frictionless, experience that any act or promoter can have on any leg of the tour.
'February through to June, we're a football stadium, and not just any football stadium. We're the football stadium, and that's what everyone's focus is on. But when we hit June through to the Community Shield, we're a live-event venue and every event is as important as the last. The second it's not, we're not doing the job.'
Watching what that FA Cup semi-final victory meant to Palace and their fans — and the defeat to Villa and theirs — it was easy to see what Smyth meant about Wembley still being the football stadium and things mattering more there. It certainly felt that way to me and my family when we watched our team, Southend United, lose a dramatic National League play-off final to Oldham Athletic there last weekend.
But I am still not convinced the FA made the right call in rejecting Khan's offer in 2018 — and I am not alone.
'There is no doubt it was madness not to take the money,' said a senior football official, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity to avoid upsetting anyone.
'They have done well in driving up revenue and paying off the construction debt early (which the FA achieved in 2023). But they are still not experts at running venues. You need access to a network of venues and the ability to put tours together to create the economies of scale.
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'If a similar offer were to be made today, it would be considered much more objectively, rather than people worrying about their futures in the game.'
Another former FA official, again speaking off the record to stay on peoples' Christmas card lists, told me they still think it was 'a good deal' and Wembley is 'an operational distraction' for a national governing body that should be focused on providing affordable, fun and safe spaces for everyone to play the game, developing coaches, training referees, supporting local leagues and winning World Cups.
Maybe you can do all that and run a world-class venue, he said. Maybe the venue can help to pay for the providing, developing, training, supporting and winning. 'There are views on both sides,' he admitted.
We shall see.
In the meantime, we can safely say that FA Cup semi-finals will never again be played at a Hillsborough in Sheffield or Birmingham's Villa Park. Like Khan's offer, that ship has sailed and only a Taylor Swift double-booking that April weekend could ever bring it back.