West Ham remains quietly committed to one day increasing the football capacity at the London Stadium to 66,000 surpassing Arsenal’s Emirates at 60,000 and Spurs new stadium at 62,000. Chelsea have temporarily shelved plans to increase rebuild the bridge from 41,600 to 60,000.
The Hammers want to have the biggest capacity of any London Premier League club.
The Hammers go to court next month in an attempt to increase the football capacity from 57,000 to 60,000. The increase of 3,000 seats requires no extra infrastructure such as toilets or catering and would require a minimum increase in stewarding numbers which should be funded by extra catering revenue.
The increase from 60,000 to 66,000 is estimated to cost around £10m in extra infrastructure facilities such as toilets and kiosks but that would be a small price to pay to achieve maximum capacity of the London Stadium and filling every existing seat.
There are those who will argue that many are already missing from the stadium each Premier League game but that is their personal choice despite selling out all 57,000 tickets. West Ham believes there is still demand for season tickets and increasing the capacity will help improve the atmosphere as well as bringing extra catering and sponsorship revenue to the stadium owners.
More could be done to monitor the ‘fans’ that regularly fail to turn up and not make their seats available to other people. Certainly, if someone fails to attend 50% or more games, they should have their season tickets revoked. The empty seats are an embarrassment.
Agree Ray, I know I used to get very frustrated with that when I was a claret member, the numbers seem to be there to have a full commited crowd every week but people with £99 tickets don’t have much of an incentive to put them on the list. A case of a very nice idea by the chairmen that backfired.