Wembley Stadium, currently branded as Wembley Stadium connected by EE for sponsorship reasons, is an association football stadium in Wembley, London, England. It opened in 2007 on the site of the original Wembley Stadium, which had stood from 1923 until 2000. The stadium is England's national football stadium, and thus hosts the majority of the England national team home matches and the FA Cup Final – the final of England's primary domestic club football competition. It is considered one of the most well known football stadiums in the world, and is considered a hub for the English game. Wembley Stadium is owned by the governing body of English football, the Football Association, whose headquarters are in the stadium, through its subsidiary Wembley National Stadium Ltd (WNSL). With 90,000 seats, it is the largest stadium in the UK and the second-largest stadium in Europe, behind Barcelona's Camp Nou.
Designed by Populous and Foster and Partners, the stadium is crowned by the 134-metre-high (440 ft) Wembley Arch which serves aesthetically as a landmark across London as well as structurally, with the arch supporting over 75% of the entire roof load. The stadium was built by Australian firm Multiplex at a cost of £798 million (£1.41 billion today). Two partially retractable roof structures over the east and west ends of the stadium can be opened to allow sunlight and aid pitch growth.
In addition to England home games and the FA Cup final, the stadium also hosts other major games in English football, including the season-opening FA Community Shield, the finals of lower tiered cup competition – the FA Trophy, the FA Vase, finals of the EFL Cup and EFL Trophy, the FA Cup semi-finals, and the promotion play-off finals of the tiers two, three, four, and five of the English football league system. The stadium also hosts the Women's FA Cup finals and an increasing number of home games of the England women's national football team.
A UEFA category four stadium, Wembley hosted the 2011, 2013 and the 2024 Champions League Finals, eight games at UEFA Euro 2020 (including the final and both of the semi-finals), and hosted the final of the UEFA Women's Euro 2022. The stadium hosted the gold-medal matches at the 2012 Olympic Games football tournament. The stadium also hosts the Rugby Football League's Challenge Cup, Women's Challenge Cup, and 1895 Cup finals, in addition to various music concerts. The stadium also hosts NFL London Games and was the temporary home of Premier League football club Tottenham Hotspur between August 2017 and March 2019, while White Hart Lane was being demolished and their new stadium was constructed. Wembley has also been chosen as one of the host stadia for UEFA Euro 2028.
In 2014, Wembley Stadium entered into a six-year sponsorship agreement with mobile provider EE Limited, under which it provides technology and infrastructure services for the venue. Under the agreement, the facility is officially referred to as "Wembley Stadium connected by EE". The deal was renewed in 2019 and again in 2025 for a further four years, through to 2028.
Stadium
Wembley was designed by architects Foster + Partners and HOK Sport (now Populous) and with engineers Mott Stadium Consortium, who were a collection of three structural engineering consultants in the form of Mott MacDonald, Sinclair Knight Merz and Aurecon. The design of the building services was carried out by Mott MacDonald. The construction of the stadium was managed by Australian company Multiplex and funded by Sport England, WNSL (Wembley National Stadium Limited), the Football Association, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and the London Development Agency. It is one of the most expensive stadia ever built at a cost of £798 million in 2007, and has the largest roof-covered seating capacity in the world. Nathaniel Lichfield and Partners was appointed to assist Wembley National Stadium Limited in preparing the scheme for a new stadium and to obtain planning and listed building permission for the development.
The all-seater stadium is a bowl design with a capacity of 90,000, protected from the elements by a sliding roof that does not completely enclose it. The stadium's signature feature is a circular section lattice arch of 7 m (23 ft) internal diameter with a 315 m (1,033 ft) span, erected some 22° off true, and rising to 133 m (436 ft). It supports all the weight of the north roof and 60% of the weight of the retractable roof on the southern side. The arch is the world's longest unsupported roof structure.
A platform system was designed in order to temporarily convert the stadium to athletics use, but its use would decrease the stadium's capacity to approximately 60,000. No athletics events (track and field) have taken place at the stadium; the conversion for athletics use was a condition of part of the lottery funding the stadium received, but to convert it would take weeks of work and cost millions of pounds. Instead, with the awarding of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games to London in 2005, the London Olympic Stadium has been used for major athletics events since 2012.
Construction
The initial plan for the reconstruction of Wembley Stadium was for demolition to begin before Christmas 2000, and for the new stadium to be completed some time during 2003, but this work was delayed by a succession of financial and legal difficulties. In 2004, London Mayor Ken Livingstone and Brent Council also announced wider plans for the regeneration of Wembley, taking in the arena and the surrounding areas as well as the stadium, to be implemented over two or three decades. Demolition officially began on 30 September 2002, with the Twin Towers being dismantled in December 2002.
Delays to the construction project started as far back as 2003. In December 2003, the constructors of the arch, subcontractors Cleveland Bridge & Engineering Company of Darlington, warned Multiplex about rising costs. Cleveland Bridge withdrew from the project and were replaced by Dutch firm Hollandia, with all the attendant problems of starting over. 2004 also saw errors, most notably a fatal accident involving carpenter Patrick O'Sullivan for which construction firm PC Harrington Contractors were fined £150,000 in relation to breaches of health and safety laws.
In October 2005, Sports Minister Richard Caborn announced: "They say the Cup Final will be there, barring six feet of snow or something like that". By November 2005, WNSL were still hopeful of a handover date of 31 March, in time for the cup final on 13 May. However, in December 2005, the builders admitted that there was a "material risk" that the stadium might not be ready in time for the final. In February 2006 these worries were confirmed, with the FA moving the game to Cardiff's Millennium Stadium.
On 20 March 2006, a steel rafter in the roof of the new development fell by 1+1⁄2 ft (46 cm), forcing 3,000 workers to evacuate the stadium and raising further doubts over the completion date which was already behind schedule. On 23 March 2006, sewers beneath the stadium buckled due to ground movement. GMB Union leader Steve Kelly said that the problem had been caused by the pipes not being properly laid, and that the repair would take months. A spokesman for developers Multiplex said that they did not believe this would "have any impact on the completion of the stadium", which was then scheduled to be completed on 31 March 2006.
On 30 March 2006, the developers announced that Wembley Stadium would not be ready until 2007. All competitions and concerts planned were to be moved to suitable locations. On 19 June 2006, it was announced that the turf had been laid. On 19 October 2006 it was announced that the venue was now set to open in early 2007 after the dispute between the Football Association and Multiplex had finally been settled. WNSL was expected to pay around £36m to Multiplex, on top of the amount of the original fixed-price contract. The total cost of the project (including local transport infrastructure redevelopment and the cost of financing) was estimated to be £1 billion.
For the new stadium the level of the pitch was lowered. During excavation of the new playing field, mechanical diggers unearthed a buried obstruction: the concrete foundations of Watkin's Tower, a failed attempt to construct a rival to the Eiffel Tower in London. Only the base of the tower was ever built before being abandoned and demolished in 1907; the site was later used as the location for the first Wembley Stadium.
Handover and opening
The new stadium was completed and handed over to the FA on 9 March 2007. The official Wembley Stadium website had announced that the stadium would be open for public viewing for local residents of Brent on 3 March 2007, however this was delayed by two weeks and instead happened on 17 March.
While the stadium had hosted football matches since the handover in March, the stadium was officially opened on Saturday 19 May, with the staging of the 2007 FA Cup Final. Eight days before that on Friday 11 May, the statue of Bobby Moore had been unveiled by his former England team-mate Sir Bobby Charlton outside the stadium entrance, as the "finishing touch" to the completion of the stadium. The twice life-size bronze statue, sculpted by Philip Jackson, depicts England's 1966 World Cup winning captain Bobby Moore, looking down Olympic Way.
Structure
The stadium contains 2,618 toilets, more than any other venue in the world.
The stadium has a circumference of 1 km (0.62 mi).
The bowl volume is listed at 1,139,100 m3 (1,489,900 yd3), somewhat smaller than the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, but with a greater seating capacity.
At its peak, there were more than 3,500 construction workers on site.
4,000 separate piles form the foundations of the new stadium, the deepest of which is 35 m (115 ft).
There are 56 km (35 mi) of heavy-duty power cables in the stadium.
90,000 m3 (120,000 yd3) of concrete and 23,000 tonnes (25,000 short tons) of steel were used in the construction of the new stadium.
The total length of the escalators is 400 metres (1⁄4 mi).
The arch has a cross-sectional diameter greater than that of a cross-channel Eurostar train.
Pitch
The pitch size, as lined for association football, is 115 yd (105 m) long by 75 yd (69 m) wide, slightly narrower than the old Wembley, as required by the UEFA stadium categories for a category four stadium, the top category.
In a period after the completion of the new Wembley, the pitch came into disrepute. It was described as being "no good" and "not in the condition that Wembley used to be known for" by Slaven Bilić before a game between England and the team he managed, Croatia, in November 2007. The pitch was cut up during the game, which was blamed by some as the reason England did not qualify for UEFA Euro 2008. The Football Association admitted in April 2009, after the FA Cup semi-finals, that improvements were needed to the Wembley pitch, after criticism of the surface by coaches Alex Ferguson, Arsène Wenger and David Moyes.
In March 2010, the surface was relaid for the tenth time since opening. In April 2010, the pitch was again criticised following the FA Cup semi-finals, during which the players found it difficult to keep their footing and the surface cut up despite the dry conditions. The then Tottenham Hotspur boss, Harry Redknapp, labelled it a "disgrace" after his side's semi-final defeat to Portsmouth. After the 2010 FA Cup Final, Chelsea captain John Terry said: "The pitch ruined the final. It's probably the worst pitch we've played on all year. It was not good enough for a Wembley pitch." The stadium was then relaid with a Desso GrassMaster semi-artificial pitch, ahead of the 2010 community shield game between Chelsea and Manchester United. Michael Owen, who previously criticised the pitch for causing him injury, said that it was much improved.
In 2023, the stadium switched to a carpet lay and play system.
Wembley has been used for American football matches in the National Football League's International Series. Tottenham Hotspur hosted Manchester City in a Premier League match on 29 October 2018, a day after Wembley hosted the Philadelphia Eagles and Jacksonville Jaguars. Due to the short turnaround, faded gridiron markings and the NFL logo were clearly visible on the pitch along with worn grass along the centre of the pitch and the touch-lines. Tottenham were forced to hold the match at Wembley due to construction delays to their new ground. Despite the pitch's condition, UEFA allowed a Champions League leg to be played at Wembley on 6 November 2018 with Tottenham hosting Dutch side PSV Eindhoven.
Covering
The stadium roof has an area of 40,000 m2 (430,000 ft2), of which 13,722 m2 (147,700 ft2) is movable. The primary reason for the sliding roof was to avoid shading the pitch, as grass demands direct sunlight to grow effectively. The sliding roof design minimises the shadow by having the roof pulled back on the east, west and south. Angus Campbell, the chief architect, also said that an aim was for the pitch to be in sunlight during matches played between 3 pm and 5 pm from the beginning of May to the end of June, when the FA and World Cups would be played. However, it was mentioned during live commentary of the mid-May 2007 FA Cup Final that the pitch was in partial shade at the start at 3 pm and also during the match.
The stadium roof rises to 52 metres (171 ft) above the pitch and is supported by an arch rising 133 m (436 ft) above the level of the external concourse. With a span of 315 m (1,033 ft), the arch is the longest single-span roof structure in the world.
Litigation
The Australian firm Multiplex, which was the main contractor on Wembley Stadium, made significant losses on the project. In an attempt to recoup some of those losses, the firm initiated a number of legal cases against its sub-contractors and consultants. The largest of these – the largest construction claim in UK legal history – was a claim for £253 million against the structural engineering consultants Mott MacDonald.
In preliminary hearings the two architecture practices which worked for Multiplex on the project were ordered to allow Multiplex access to their records for them to build a case. The practices, Foster + Partners and Populous, estimated the costs of providing access and answering Multiplex's queries at £5 million. Mott MacDonald issued a counter-claim for unpaid fees of £250,000.
The dispute between Multiplex and Mott MacDonald was settled out of court in June 2010, ahead of a January 2011 trial. The terms of the settlement not disclosed, but it was reported that Multiplex "would not be out of pocket".
Multiplex also took the original steel contractor, Cleveland Bridge, to court claiming £38 million compensation for costs resulting from Cleveland Bridge withdrawing from the project. Cleveland Bridge, in turn, claimed up to £15 million from Multiplex. The case was resolved in September 2008 with Cleveland Bridge ordered to pay £6.1 million in damages and 20% of Multiplex's costs, after the court found against Cleveland Bridge. The judge criticised both sides for allowing the case to reach court, pointing out that total costs were £22 million, including £1 million for photocopying. Multiplex's ultimate bill is estimated to be over £10 million. In 2007, Multiplex also contested a claim from its concrete contractor, PC Harrington, that Multiplex owes £13.4 million to PC Harrington.
Bid to buy
In April 2018, Shahid Khan, the owner of Fulham and the Jacksonville Jaguars, put forward an offer to purchase Wembley Stadium from the FA. The deal included not only the purchase of the stadium, but also providing the FA full rights to keep control of the Club Wembley business. On 18 July 2018, a parliamentary select committee was held to discuss the possible sale, with evidence being given by former player, Gary Neville, and Katrina Law of the Football Supporters' Federation. The offer was withdrawn on 17 October 2018.
Sport
Given the ownership of the stadium by the Football Association (the governing body of English football), the England national football team is a major user of Wembley. In 2007, the League Cup final moved back to Wembley from Cardiff following the FA Cup final and FA Community Shield. Other showpiece football matches that were previously staged at Wembley, such as the Football League promotion play-offs and the Football League Trophy final, have returned to the stadium. In addition, the Conference National (now National League) play-off final is held at Wembley since 2007, and the FA Women's Cup final since 2015.
The new Wembley was a significant part of the plan for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London; the stadium was the site of several games in both the men's and women's football tournaments, with the finals being held there. The FA offices at Wembley Stadium, with social areas and boardroom, were designed by architects Gebler Tooth – who were also responsible for Team GB House at the London 2012 Olympics.
Additionally, the Rugby League Challenge Cup Final returned to Wembley Stadium in 2007, and the stadium also hosted both semi-finals of the 2013 Rugby League World Cup. Wembley was one of the 13 venues for the 2015 Rugby World Cup.
The Race of Champions staged their 2007 and 2008 events at the stadium.
Tottenham Hotspur agreed with the operators (Wembley National Stadium Ltd) to use the stadium for all of their European fixtures during the 2016–17 season, before using the stadium for the entire 2017–18 season. They also played most of their home games of the 2018–19 season at Wembley and continued until April 2019 when they moved to their new stadium.
Regular events
Wembley has a series of annual events that under normal circumstances are hosted at the stadium every year. These events cover the sports of football, rugby league and American football.
Football
The first match at the stadium was a game played behind closed doors between Multiplex and Wembley Stadium staff. The first game in front of spectators was between the Geoff Thomas Foundation Charity XI and the Wembley Sponsors Allstars on 17 March 2007. The Geoff Thomas Foundation Charity XI won 2–0 (scorers Mark Bright and Simon Jordan). The first official match involving professional players was England U21s vs Italy U21s on 24 March 2007, which finished 3–3. Official attendance was 56,700 (although all of the 60,000 tickets that were made available were sold in advance). The first player to score in a FIFA-sanctioned match was Italian striker Giampaolo Pazzini after 28 seconds of the same game; he also scored the first hat-trick at Wembley. The first English player to score in a full-scale match was David Bentley with a free kick in the same game.
The first club game, competitive game, and cup final held at the new Wembley took place on 12 May 2007 when Kidderminster Harriers met Stevenage Borough in the FA Trophy final. Kidderminster striker James Constable was the first player to score a goal in a final at the new Wembley. Kidderminster became the first team to play at both the old and new stadium. Stevenage Borough were the first team to win a final at the new Wembley beating Kidderminster 3–2, despite trailing 2–0 at half time. The first players to play at both the old and new Wembley Stadiums were Steve Guppy (for Stevenage Borough) and Jeff Kenna (for Kidderminster Harriers). Ex-England international Guppy is also the first player to win a final at both stadia (with Wycombe Wanderers and Leicester City in the old Wembley, then Stevenage Borough in the new one). Ronnie Henry is the first ever player to lift a competitive club trophy at the new Wembley.
The first penalty save and first red card came in the Conference National playoff final between Exeter City and Morecambe. The penalty was saved by Paul Jones of Exeter City from Morecambe striker Wayne Curtis. The red card was given to Matthew Gill of Exeter for a headbutt on Craig Stanley of Morecambe.
The first Football League teams to play at Wembley in a competitive fixture were Bristol Rovers and Shrewsbury Town in the 2007 Football League Two play-off final on 26 May 2007. Shrewsbury Town became the first league team to score at Wembley via a Stewart Drummond goal, they also the first league team to have a player sent off, in this case – Marc Tierney.
Bristol Rovers won the game 3–1 in front of 61,589 which was a stadium record until the Championship play-off final two days later when Derby County beat West Bromwich Albion 1–0 to become the first team at the new stadium to win promotion to the FA Premier League.
The first FA Cup Final at the new Wembley (between Manchester United and Chelsea) was on 19 May 2007, with a crowd attendance of 89,826. Chelsea won 1–0 with a goal by Didier Drogba, making him the first player to score in the FA Cup Final at the new Wembley – the first male player to score in four separate FA Cup Finals. Chelsea goalkeeper Petr Čech also became the first goalkeeper not to concede a goal in a competitive game at Wembley. Chelsea were the last winners of the cup final at the old Wembley and the first winners at the new.