Perhaps now more than at any other point in the modern history of football, the subject of stadia is increasingly dominant. Manchester United are trying to completely rebuild Old Trafford to the cost of £2 billion ($2.7bn). Spurs are six years into the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium experience and at last have a trophy to put in their new cabinet. Chelsea's dispute over land in west London continues to cast a shadow over the future and suitability of Stamford Bridge. Newcastle's Saudi owners are still deciding whether they should expand St James' Park or make use of the space on the adjacent land to start from scratch.
And then we have Arsenal, who must feel like the J. Robert Oppenheimer of these lavish new builds. Back in 2006, the Gunners made the short move from their iconic Highbury home to a plush arena on the site of Ashburton Grove, known nowadays as the Emirates Stadium.
Almost 20 years on, the north Londoners are looking into the prospect of expanding their home. It has been reported throughout 2025 that this was becoming much more of a topic of discussion within the club's walls, and the broke the news on Tuesday that they are indeed planning what has been described as 'major expansion'. There is, however, a pitfall that will affect match-going supporters.
In order to undertake the works necessary for renovations, Arsenal would have to temporarily up sticks and play their home matches elsewhere for an undetermined period of time. The most likely venue would be Wembley, which boasts a capacity of 90,000 and is only about 10 miles across the capital city. On the face of it, that's hardly a negative, but it's only when you dig deeper that you realise the major downsides of such a move.
GOAL runs through why Arsenal's hopes of redeveloping the Emirates won't be as straightforward as they appear on the surface, and who would suffer most during the process…
Getty Images SportWhy Arsenal left Highbury
The younger generation of football fans likely won't even remember Highbury. Several of Arsenal's current first-team stars, including Max Dowman, Myles Lewis-Skelly and Ethan Nwaneri, were born well after the club left their spiritual home behind. Much of the old ground has been turned into flats, with some keeping and incorporating features of the stands that once stood there, if in part because of their statuses as grade-listed buildings.
Arsenal first explored leaving Highbury somewhere between Arsene Wenger's appointment as manager in 1996 and his first Premier League title in 1998. Requirements for English stadiums to become all-seater significantly reduced the capacity of the stadium, which became detrimental in an age where matchday revenue was becoming a major differential when it came to clubs' finances, best represented by Manchester United's success of that time and their redevelopment of Old Trafford.
Ironically, Arsenal considered buying Wembley Stadium, which itself was set to be demolished and rebuilt. As was pointed out in September when they faced the only other Football League club not named after a location in Port Vale, Arsenal didn't have to remain within the London borough of Islington in order to keep their name, which would have made such a move viable, even if it would have been unpopular to the local community. The Gunners even played Champions League matches at the national stadium between 1998 and 2000 in order to maximise that precious matchday revenue. However, the FA were reluctant to sign off a deal and the club eventually withdrew their interest in making it their permanent home.
Finding land sizeable enough to build a 60,000-seater stadium in London is scarce, but Arsenal were fortunate enough to find a suitable plot less than 500 yards from Highbury. In December 2001, after overcoming several hurdles and naysayers, the club first received official approval from Islington Council, subject to helping relocate local businesses, a waste recycling plant already on the site and upgrade of nearby Underground stations. "This is the most complicated stadium development in the world," Danny Fiszman, the late Arsenal director, claimed at the time. Wenger said it was the "biggest decision in Arsenal's history."
It wasn't until August 2006 that Arsenal were able to move into their palace of a new stadium, which sold its naming rights to airline Emirates in 2004 for an initial £100m, covering roughly a quarter of the project's cost.
Owing to Premier League broadcast money going through the roof and reaching unprecedented levels during the late 2000s and early 2010s, Arsenal didn't even feel the financial benefit of the move until about 2014 when they paid off the debts accrued to build the Emirates Stadium in the first place. Deloitte figures for 2023-24 confirmed their status as the division's second-highest earners for matchday revenue, behind only United, but there is a looming threat of others overtaking them in the near future, including Tottenham, Liverpool and Manchester City, hence the need to expand.
AdvertisementGetty Images SportIssues expanding Emirates Stadium
The problems Arsenal once had both trying to expand Highbury and move into the site on Ashburton Grove are largely similar for the Emirates Stadium. As pointed out during the initial reporting this week, there is very little room to build out on the existing plot, given there are railway lines on two sides. On another, there is the busy Hornsey Road, which itself backs onto the even busier A1. From a safety perspective, there is only one vehicle ramp into the grounds for emergency services to use, and this would have to remain post-expansion.
The report adds that Arsenal's likeliest path to rebuilding will be from within the space they already occupy. In order to add more seats, they would change the angles of the current configuration to become steeper, reduce the already generous legroom in existing rows and adjust the slope of the roof. It has previously been suggested that the two corners which do not house a big screen could be filled with seats too.
Regardless, this is not going to be a simple or ordinary redevelopment. It's impossible for the Emirates Stadium to undergo a worthwhile expansion without bringing some sort of disruption with it. Thus comes the need to move out and play matches elsewhere.
Getty Images SportTottenham and the Wembley curse
As mentioned, Arsenal have played home matches at Wembley before, though in a different era and without much success. Wenger's teams of the 1998-1999 and 1999-2000 seasons fulfilled their home Champions League group stage fixtures in the London borough of Brent inside the old stadium with attendances slightly north of 70,000, though won only two of their six games there and were eliminated before the second stage on both occasions.
Much more recently, rivals Spurs spent three seasons staging home games at the new national stadium to a varying degree of success. Like Arsenal, they took Wembley for a test run during their 2016-17 Champions League campaign, but were knocked out at the group stage and then dumped out in the last 32 of the Europa League in humiliating fashion. There was also an agreement in place for Tottenham to spend the entire 2017-18 season there while they built their new £1bn ($1.3bn) ground on the site of the incumbent White Hart Lane, and though this proved to be a fine season by their standards, it arguably came at the worst possible time. The Spurs side of 2016-17 finished second in the Premier League and tallied a club-record 86 points, boasting a young team of stars such as Harry Kane, Dele Alli, Son Heung-min and Christian Eriksen, with Mauricio Pochettino in the dugout. They won 17 and drew two of their 19 league matches at home during White Hart Lane's farewell season, dropping only four points from a possible 57, before throwing away five from their first two matches at Wembley the following campaign.
Centre-back Toby Alderweireld admitted at the time that he and his team-mates had to get used to their new surroundings, and he span a story of how he would use features of White Hart Lane's architecture to calibrate his positioning and long-range passing. That was one teething problem to address, but another was the completely different atmosphere. Where the 36,000-capacity White Hart Lane kept noise inside and bounced around, neatly complementing Pochettino's intense pressing style, Wembley's vast open spaces meant you would often hear various chants at the same time which brought no bite, while lower profile matches saw little sound at all. The sense of community disappears in a bowl like that. This particularly became of detriment to Spurs when they were unexpectedly forced to spend the majority of 2018-19 at Wembley owing to delays finalising the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
Spurs won only one of their first six matches at Wembley and were relieved to finally head back home in April 2019, returning to the same location where their old stadium once stood, which was another understated part of the move. Though Tottenham isn't too far from the national stadium – about a 30-minute drive round the North Circular Road on a good day – the area surrounding it is soulless, gentrified and not fit for club football. The outlets and novelty of it are fine for cup finals, England games, concerts or other sports, but when you're having to schlep there every other week, there's only the 90 minutes of the actual game to look forward to, which isn't always what football is about. A common 'what if' among Spurs fans nowadays revolves around the potential of having stayed at White Hart Lane for the remainder of the Pochettino era rather than going through a seismic period of transition.
The warning to Arsenal is twofold. Any move to Wembley, at this point for an unspecified amount of time but surely for at least one planned season, could lead to a period of tactical adjustment, and the longer they stay there increases the risk of apathy among supporters, which in turn would remove the atmospheric threat of home-field advantage.
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Getty Images SportNot about attendances
Tottenham averaged crowds of 67,953 in their one full Premier League season at Wembley, breaking the attendance record at 83,222 during a 1-0 win against Arsenal. They also welcomed 83,782 and 84,010 spectators in Champions League clashes with Real Madrid and Juventus respectively. But when Spurs had to continue there for 2018-19, attendances dropped to a mean of 52,584, with Pochettino bemoaning the occasions where the entire upper tier of the bowl was closed off.
Therein lies another issue Arsenal would face. Tottenham had to receive special permission from Brent council to play their 2017-18 matches with the freedom to sell tickets for all 90,000 seats, with many locals opposed to such a move. Under current rules, Wembley can only host a certain number of full-capacity events per calendar year, which meant Spurs did not bother seeking that same approval for 2018-19. They had to accept their status as tenants rather than leaseholders, but this still led to various problems, including having to host a Carabao Cup win versus Watford at Stadium:MK in Milton Keynes – over 50 miles away – due to a clash of events, a Premier League loss to Manchester City being overshadowed by the ripped-up and spray-painted turf the match was played on after hosting the NFL one day prior, and then having to play three games in six days due to the inability to reschedule this tie.
There is no doubt that Arsenal would be able to come close to selling out Wembley should they move in as renters, just as Spurs did to the tune of £15m, and this would give supporters currently unable to frequent the Emirates Stadium due to the club's competitive ballot scheme the opportunity to see their heroes in the flesh. Conversely, the additional number of tourists and away fans capable of purchasing tickets in the home end would dilute an atmosphere which is already fiercely criticised at their current stadium. Arsenal and their supporters would be second-class citizens at the mercy of Wembley's operators.