Arsenal Women and Emirates Stadium: An explainer

Over the last two seasons, Arsenal have made a concerted effort to play more Arsenal Women games at Emirates Stadium with impressive results. They have broken several attendance records in doing so. This season, Arsenal Women are playing five of their home games at Emirates Stadium and six of them at Boreham Wood’s Meadow Park, which has been their long-term (rented) home ground.

Clearly, there is a significant divergence between the 60,000-seater stadium they own which hosts all the men’s team home games and the 4,500 capacity Meadow Park they have rented for the women’s team over the last couple of decades. Demand for tickets has scaled up enormously quickly since the success of the Lionesses at Euro 2022. Prior to that, sold out home games at Meadow Park were exceptionally unusual, now it is the norm and it is clear that Arsenal have outgrown Meadow Park.

The club has publicly stated that its ambition is to move the women’s team to the Emirates permanently. Many Arsenal fans ask me why the club doesn’t investigate an interim sized option rather than trying to leap from 4,500 to 60,000 capacity. Here are some reasons that is almost certainly impossible.

There is no land to build on in London
You simply cannot build a medium sized stadium in London now, let alone in North London. The land does not exist. In 2021, I covered Arsenal’s game at Barcelona Femeni at their purpose-built Johan Cruyff Stadium. Though it only holds 6,000 it is pretty perfect, in terms of facilities, for Barca Femeni. The trouble is that it’s not exactly easy to purchase land in Barcelona either and the ground is way out of town, next to the airport.

Arsenal had the idea to build a purpose-built stadium for the women’s and youth teams circa 2015 but mothballed the project because it was decided the Hertfordshire location was too remote and inaccessible and not easily reached by public transport. If land were available in London, you can bet that Crystal Palace, for example, would be looking to relocate from Selhurst Park but the land doesn’t exist, so, instead, they are redeveloping.

There is a second reason that building a purpose-built stadium right now would not be desirable, even if a convenient plot of land did exist in North London or South Herts. It would be incredibly difficult to predict what the capacity ought to be. Manchester City have the Academy Stadium for their women’s team, which holds 7,000.

That was a perfectly reasonable capacity until very recently. Likewise, Chelsea bought the 4,850 capacity Kingsmeadow from Kingstonian for their youth and women’s teams. Again, that looked a very far-sighted, progressive decision until very recently and then, virtually overnight, 4,850 suddenly looked insufficient. Few foresaw this incalculable boom in demand even two years ago. Who is to say where the needle will settle on demand for Arsenal Women tickets?

If Arsenal had built that purpose-built ground deep in the Hertfordshire countryside in 2014, they would currently be plotting how to get away from it already. If, in a fictional version of London, they located a spot and spent a lot of time and resource building, let’s say, a 20,000-capacity stadium, they might find it rendered insufficient very quickly.

Any women’s team looking to create a purpose-built stadium probably needs to wait a year or two to see where demand flatlines. Then again, it’s potentially volatile anyway. Demand might settle at a certain point but if the Lionesses were to win the 2027 World Cup we would almost certainly see another huge boom in demand.

Arsenal’s deal with Boreham Wood

Arsenal’s current deal to rent Boreham Wood’s ground currently runs until 2027. The club signed a ten-year partnership extension with the National League club in 2017. Arsenal have made financial contributions to several stadium upgrades in that time, with a new North Bank Stand completed in 2019, new dugouts, a new home changing room and, this summer, Boreham Wood completed work on installing a bar in the Northeast corner of the ground.

The interesting aspect of the partnership now is that Arsenal Women games are comfortably the best attended matches at the ground, easily outstripping the demand Boreham Wood FC experience. Arsenal youth games are typically watched by a few hundred. Boreham Wood’s attendance varies a little depending on the size of the opponent (they had over 2,000 for the visit of Southend recently) but they tend to hover at the 900-1,000 mark for an average National League game.

Arsenal Women are selling the ground out pretty much every time they play there now. That means greater resource is required to run the AWFC matches. I am sure that Boreham Wood would really like for the women’s team to extend its lease after 2027 but, I would imagine (and I don’t know this for sure) that, for Arsenal, that is a sort of soft deadline to see whether they can move the women’s team into the Emirates full-time.

What are the barriers to making the Emirates the full-time home of the women’s team?

Well, first of all, making sure the demand is there on a regular basis. Any attendance of over 10,000 for a match held at the Emirates has to be treated as a ‘large event’ per Islington Council. That means local road closures and, essentially, a full matchday staff. Clearly, that adds to the cost of holding the games significantly.

If you get an attendance of under 10,000 it’s a lot more cost effective because you only need hire a skeleton matchday staff and you don’t need to apply for road closures and run a full police and stewarding operation. Basically, if you sell 10,001 tickets, you have to run the game as if you have sold 60,000. Games at the stadium are only really financially viable if they are sold out or as close to sold out as possible.

When Arsenal held the first two WSL games of the season at the Emirates, against Liverpool and Aston Villa, they were basically stress-testing demand. The Villa game happened a fortnight after the Liverpool game. Playing consecutive home matches at the stadium was a deliberate ploy to see what demand looks like when games happen more regularly at the stadium.

Clearly Arsenal have made huge marketing and commercial efforts to sell tickets for the women’s games at the Emirates. It wouldn’t be sustainable to do that if Arsenal were playing at the stadium every fortnight and the messaging would lose its impact in any case. The club very deliberately dialled the level of marketing down for the Aston Villa game, hot on the heels of the match against Liverpool, just to see where the needle would naturally sit in terms of demand.

The attendance for the Liverpool game was 54,115. The attendance for the Villa match a fortnight later was 35,829, which is very healthy. But there are other considerations too, like scheduling. The men’s and women’s teams still regularly play on the same day (on January 20, the women’s home game with Everton overlaps the men’s home game against Crystal Palace).

The Emirates has a license for a certain number of events per year, which they would have to apply to extend. The ground staff would also have to consider how to deal with the increased demands on the turf. I wouldn’t consider these to be enormous obstacles. There isn’t much of a culture of corporate hospitality at women’s football yet and that is where the Emirates really makes its money, that arm of sales would have to be developed too.

What are big attendances worth beyond good PR?
The good PR that comes with record attendances and an emerging fan culture that is the talk of the WSL are very welcome but there are more tangible rewards too. For a start, the player market is competitive and large crowds and an engaged fan base are attractive when looking to recruit the best players.

In November, Jonas Eidevall set out the financial advantage Arsenal are establishing while other clubs look to catch up with the North London attendance boom. “The reality is there is not a prize money structure yet in the European competitions that give you a huge advantage. It still covers your expenses and not more. But it is a giant leap to going from selling 4,000 tickets to 60,000.

“That is a huge, huge leap which grows revenue, which enables sustainability and investing into the team and giving you more sporting success. The interest we have around the team is great, as a club, like we are doing, we need to capitalise on that and make sure that is one of the things that makes Arsenal stand out compared to our competitors. We should really generate momentum and as a foundation to drive sporting success in a way that our competitors, at the moment, cannot do.”

The bottom line is that elite women’s football in the WSL is still sustained by money from the men’s sides (think of it as reparations for decades of neglect for women’s football and the 50-year FA ban from 1921 until 1971). Women’s football is still on a journey to sustainability and, as with many startup businesses, clubs are investing now to grow the business in the hope of future return. Arsenal regularly commanding large attendances gives them a decent revenue injection and a market advantage over their competitors.

Arsenal moving their women’s team to the Emirates Stadium is an ambitious journey and one partially driven by necessity. Meadow Park and the Emirates are really their only viable long-term options and the former is now clearly too small, so why wouldn’t you aim for the latter? However, it isn’t and won’t be a linear journey and there will be some wrinkles to fold along the way.

If you want to hear a little more on this subject, last year we spoke to Emirates Stadium Venue Director Tom McCann about the women’s team at the Emirates on the Arsenal Women Arsecast and you can find all the links for that here.