Has new stadium hindered Spurs?

 

A few extracts from an article in The Times today by James Gheerbant follow.   As at most football clubs, if things go wrong, its agency not structure and agency means the manager.   However, arguably Spurs face deeper problems than the person in charge.   The new stadium is splendid, but Arsenal took years to recover from the Emirates move and West Ham have never been happy at the London Stadium.   Wenger reckoned that Arsenal lost their soul when they moved.

The new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium was supposed to be the final piece of the project to take Spurs from middling London outfit to global super-club, and in financial terms, it has certainly pulled its weight. Tottenham now have the ninth-highest revenue of any club in the world, ahead of Borussia Dortmund, Atletico Madrid and every Italian team. By a system of trays and motors, rails and pulleys, the football pitch can be retracted, enabling the stadium’s lucrative conversion into an NFL arena, concert venue and multi-purpose pleasuredrome.

Yet despite its dazzling panoply of uses, the stadium remains a strangely blank presence. Against the club’s original intention, it is still sponsorless, and more to the point, vibeless. It is beset by bad juju and bedevilled by complaints that it lacks atmosphere. This week, it saw off its sixth permanent Tottenham head coach in less than seven years. The managers come and go as if on wheels and rails; they can be turfed out just as easily as the turf.

While building the best stadium in the country and having it rebound on you may seem like the Spursiest thing ever, what’s going on here is more universal than just a Tottenham problem. There is a message and a mood which comes naturally with playing at a beloved, rickety, time-worn old ground, which might be roughly summarised as: This is our castle, this is our home, we’ll fight tooth and nail to defend it. Having a shiny 60,000-seater which looks great on TV takes you into a different mindset, something more expansive, more to do with entertainment. 

Where once the stadium was a place which faced inwards, which was fiercely local, which concentrated all the energy of all the history which had taken place inside it, you instead have a space which is determinedly global, which is also designed to project outwards some of its character, some sense of Tottenham’s might, to the world. But in that outward projection, it is also inevitable that some of the energy which the old stadium worked to enkindle and intensify is lost.