Arsenal is considering a temporary move to Wembley Stadium, expanding the capabilities of the Emirates Stadium home. Gunners are looking for ways to increase the stadium’s capacity from the current 60,700, and can expand it to over 70,000, which will become London’s biggest soccer field. There are several options at the table as the club considers the best options.
Arsenal is expected to be able to change the slope of the stands and change the seating plan to accommodate more fans, while still changing the appearance of the outer bowl very little. However, as reported in The Telegraph, this requires the home game to be moved to Wembley.
This is a step taken previously by North London rival Tottenham Hotspur when they destroyed White Hart Lane to build a new stadium on the same site. The next season marks 20 years since Arsenal moved to Modern Stadium a few streets away from Highbury.
When completed, it was London’s largest club stadium and the second largest in the Premier League. However, the Emirates have since surpassed 62,850 people by West Ham’s London Stadium, while the Spurs’ new stadium with 62,500 new stadiums. Liverpool’s renovated Anfield has a larger capacity than the 61,276-year-old Emirate.
The proposed expansion of Emirates Airlines could cost £500 million with an additional 10,000 seats, and is expected to generate tens of millions of additional annual revenues, and the capacity increase could help meet some of the demand from the current over 100,000 season ticket waiting lists. The plans have accelerated this year, but they are complicated.
This task involves increasing almost every part of the stadium rather than one stand, which costs hundreds of millions of yen to complete.
Arsenal is also constrained by the 17-acre site, primarily in the residential community. The Victoria and Piccadilly tube lines, as well as several nearby stations and the Great Northern Train Line, run adjacent to the ground. However, discussions with architects have been reported to be optimistic about the possibility of expanding the stadium within its current footprint.
