Stadium operators LS185 now owned by E20 have started the process to increase the football capacity of the London Stadium to 62,500.
In an existing agreement signed in January West Ham agreed to pay E20 around £3.25m in rent per year with the Hammers paying around £83 per year for each of the extra 3000 seats to reach the 60,000 capacity at the beginning of this year.
Now that West Ham have triggered the clause stadium operators must receive permission from the Newham led London Stadium Safety Advisory Group (LS-SAG), a new safety certificate from Newham Council and approval from the Sports Ground Safety Authority (SGSA)
These things take time so the earliest the extra 2,500 seats would be made available to West Ham supporters is January 2020.
I fail to see why West Ham have to pay to utilise existing seats the original contract was for the whole stadium & it seems the only error has been made by the safety authority by only issuing a licence for lesss than the capacity, which is ridiculous since all the seats were utilised in the 2012 Olympics so why wasn’t that certificate carried over for football.
For the Olympic Games, the stadium had 80,000 seats. What happened to those seats??
5,000 seats were lost with the re design of the lower bowl, a further 4,000 were lost creating the West Stand corporate area with wider seats and boxes. The remaining 6,000 were lost from the top rows when the roof was redesigned
So that leaves a potential capacity of approx. 65,000