football.london spent the day at the home of the Premier League team, Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, witnessing a totally different sport being played.
It was evident on Sunday that Tottenham Hotspur has become accustomed to hosting NFL games, as the Chicago Bears defeated the Jacksonville Jaguars in N17.
For the past five years, American football has called Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in the UK home. It is the first stadium designed just for the sport this side of the Atlantic, and Sunday’s game was as good as it gets.
Thank goodness, the weather held off long enough for the touchdowns to fall. In the Bears’ 35-16 victory, quarterback Caleb Williams, 22, who was selected first overall in the draft, found his rhythm and showed everyone why all the enthusiasm was so intense.
With their home base at Wembley, the Jags have long been associated with London. However, in N17, they were met with jeers as the Bears emerged victorious both on and off the artificial turf that sits beneath the Premier League surface where Ange Postecoglou and his squad play on most weeks.
The Australian, who loves the NFL, was at the game even though he wasn’t rooting for any of the two rival teams that day. Having attended the NFL London Games during his two seasons at Tottenham, Postecoglou seemed excited as he stood near the pitch before kickoff on Sunday, a far cry from the pressures of Premier League life.
Postecoglou played on the pitch with Shahid Khan, the chairman of Fulham and owner of the Jaguars, and Daniel Levy, the chairman of Tottenham. The Spurs manager then traded a Spurs shirt for a Bears one with his fellow countryman Tory Taylor, who was the winning team’s punter, prior to the game.
The 27-year-old is another Australian success story from the Melbourne region, home of the Tottenham head coach. Being the highest picked punter in the last five years, he played collegiate football for four years at the University of Iowa before being taken by the Bears in the fourth round of this year’s NFL draft.
Postecoglou’s smile throughout their conversation with Taylor demonstrated his evident satisfaction in any Australian who achieves success in the global arena.
When Keenan Allen intercepted Williams’ ball in the end zone, the Bears put on a fun afternoon tea party during their visit to Tottenham. His teammates were seated in a circle around him, all of them with their little fingers up in the air as they sipped from make-believe tea cups. Isn’t that what we English people do?
Despite his many years in the game, the seasoned Allen said that he was taken aback by the roar inside Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and the Bears fans’ enthusiasm.
“It wasn’t what I expected it to be, really. “Watch this, it’s a home game,” said D.J. Moore. “All right, let me see how it looks,” was my response. Something I’m not used to! In his news conference following the game, the 32-year-old wide receiver praised his performance.
The fact that two teams, theoretically, play in the massive stadium in N17 is going to irritate some Tottenham supporters. The Americans and their sports coming to North London won’t bother those Spurs fans. All of it is really a cacophonous diversion from their one and only passion, Tottenham Hotspur. To begin with, the ball is shaped incorrectly.
However, it makes little sense to construct a massive stadium worth £1 billion just to have it intentionally remain empty for almost 345 days a year. To compete with the large teams that have substantial financial bases, Tottenham must first establish a significant source of money of their own.
It is included with their stadium. 61,182 people crammed inside it on Sunday to witness the NFL halftime show. The game started at 2:30 pm, and supporters had been swarming the arena for hours prior. It didn’t conclude until about 5:00 pm.
When this reporter left after the press conferences at just before 7 p.m., there were still fans making their way into the club megastore, which is transformed and dedicated to NFL stock during this time of year. A large portion of the crowd stayed inside the stadium, eating and drinking – something they are also permitted to do in their seats during an NFL game.
Many of the guests who will eventually stay in the tall hotel that resembles a blade will also be staying in the south plaza, either the night before or the night after Spurs erect it.
Now that you have all those hours of use, you can begin to calculate how much Tottenham earns from their stadium.
You know, Spurs used to earn just less than £1 million every Premier League game at White Hart Lane. Every time Postecoglou’s team plays at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, they earn about £6 million in matchday revenue.
NFL contests varied somewhat. The Spurs essentially rent out the stadium, so their primary sources of income are the original NFL contract, the rental fee that the NFL pays as part of their contract, which was extended last year until the 2029–2030 season, and the significant revenue they receive from the megastore’s enormous sales of food, drink, and merchandise.
In terms of beverages, to put things in perspective, Bottoms Up Beer, the company that developed the equipment that swiftly fills beer cups from the bottom, tweeted in 2019 during the first NFL game played there that £1 million in sales had been made before the beer ran out in the third quarter of the game. That shattered the all-time record for beer sales at any venue in Europe at the time.
In order to make sure it never ran out of beer again, that number will only have climbed over the next years due to higher costs and beer supply.
Due to the club’s repeated failure to locate a naming rights partner that could satisfy their needs, Tottenham Hotspur Stadium has retained its name. This has produced unforeseen advantages and created opportunities for new sponsorship agreements.
Because there are two games a year played inside the stadium across the Atlantic, even those who are not familiar with the Premier League in America will be aware of Tottenham Hotspur if they are fans of the NFL. Since the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is a playable pitch in the yearly video game Madden—the NFL version of EA FC, previously FIFA—it is well-known in the sports world.
The Spurs’ aim is to one day host an NFL team from London at their stadium, with football games every other week. If pitch technology advances, they may even be able to host double header weekends or even days.
Naturally, it’s not limited to the NFL either. In addition, the F1 karting experience, boxing, rugby, concerts, conferences, tours, and other events are conducted there and generate revenue for the football club to reinvest in the squad.
Regarding currency, there was another familiar face in the stadium’s crowd. It was not Postecoglou, nor the different music stars and celebrities in the audience wanting to be a part of the moment, not Spurs players like Timo Werner or Djed Spence who were watching from the stands.
It was Amanda Staveley, who was lounging in a stadium box watching the game. The 51-year-old banker is well-known for having assisted her husband Mehrdad Ghodoussi in brokering Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund’s acquisition of Newcastle in 2021. She went on to serve as a director there for three years until publicly severing ties with the team last summer.
Since Tottenham’s chairman Daniel Levy made it obvious this year that the north London team is seeking investment, the two have been strongly connected in recent months to bringing money to the club from the Middle East.
In conjunction with stadium revenue, which contributed to the club’s record £500 million in revenue in the latest financial reports, Levy thinks that investment would establish Spurs as a formidable force to be reckoned with in the international game.
“We announced with our last results that we believe this club needs a bigger capital base because we’ve got a lot of exciting projects on the horizon and we want to make further investment in the teams,” he stated during the most recent fans’ forum. Our goal is to get a minority investment of some kind. We are in the market, but we have nothing to disclose just yet.”
Levy and Tottenham prefer to operate in the background, trying to get things done efficiently and silently. Having given more interviews in her three years at Newcastle than Levy had in decades at Spurs, Staveley appears to be a more prominent figure. She has been sighted at a recent Spurs game and is now representing the team at the NFL London Games.
It will be interesting to watch the dynamic between the former director of Newcastle and Levy, who has been a hands-on chairman for the past 25 years, down to selecting little details like door knobs within the stadium, let alone negotiating transfer fees, if the former director were to bring in the money to carve out a minority stake within Spurs.
In the next months, it will become evident what Spurs’ future holds. There is no doubt that the NFL will be a glamorous and prosperous aspect of N17 life for years to come. Although it will always remain Tottenham Hotspur’s home, the large stadium has space for a fun overnight guest on occasion.
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