London stadium seats can’t move forward
One of the biggest requests from West Ham season ticket holders is to move the London Stadium retractable seats closer to the pitch. Just before Christmas the joint stadium owners London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) confirmed an extra £21m was spent on the doomed retractable system last year and estimated costs could reach as high as £8m per year to move the seats backwards and forward unless a better solution can be found in the very near future.
The drip line of the new £190m London Stadium roof is set to the current seating configuration and the likelihood of spending more tax payers money to extend the roof further is a political no go area and extremely unlikely in the foreseeable future.
The major limitation in moving the seats further forward is the stadium is an oval so the seating need to be curved accordingly to correspond to the Stadium shape. At the half way line the front row is around 20 metres away from the pitch. Behind each goal the distance reduces to 18 metres from the front row to the goal line. At the closest point the front row is 12 metres from the pitch from the corner flags . As the diagram above shows it is case of simple geometry. An oval fitted around a rectangle will leave some empty spaces. While it might be technically possible to construct new non curved seating to fill these gaps, again the appetite to spend yet more tax payer money for little financial benefit seems a non starter for the stadium owners.
Digging down to lower the pitch as Manchester Council did for City may also cause problems unearthing tonnes of radioactive waste dumped at the former landfill site decades ago. A total of 7,300 tonnes of toxic soil was reburied just outside the stadium in a bunker. The massive bunker is the size of half a football pitch.