Emirates Stadium - Arsenal

Tues July 21

It was up early and on the tube in the rain out to Arsenal in north-east London to visit Emirates Stadium, home of Arsenal Football Club, one of the game’s super powers.

Emirates Stadium opened in 2006 and has a capacity of 60,355 - fifth largest football stadium in the UK and the third largest stadium in London, after Wembley and Twickenham.

Arsenal’s administrative headquarters are based at Highbury House, a short walk away from the stadium, the equivalent distance of Rod Laver Arena to the MCG.

During the day I met with Arsenal’s facilities, media, marketing and customer service managers on an individual basis.

While we appear to be streets ahead in some areas like environmental management (in particular waste and water recycling, which seems almost non-existent in the UK) it was mind boggling to discover the resources at the disposal of the club’s marketing and communications teams.

Points of interest:

· The club has in-house website and publications team and two full-time photographers.
· Sky Media sells advertising space on Arsenal’s website.
· The stadium can only hold three events per year that are not Arsenal FC matches.
· Like most UK football stadiums, drinking in the seats is outlawed.
· There are 48,000 people on a waiting list for a season ticket!
· The home rooms are in a horseshoe shape, because manager Arsene Wagner believes square rooms give off a bad vibe! Not surprisingly, the away rooms are a square shape…

The media facilities certainly put the MCG to shame. There is a 200-seat post-match media conference room, with a separate work room (no view of the ground) that seats 200-plus with individual workstations, plus 120 seating positions outside to watch the game.

Aside from the meetings, I took the stadium tour. Luckily, today was one of the two days a week when a Legends Tour is held, this one being taken by 1960s-70s Arsenal star Charlie George.

Although I know precious little about the game’s history, it was obvious from others in the 40-strong tour group that Charlie is one of the greats, so it was good to get the inside word from a former player’s perspective.

The players’ change room is so well resourced that there is a hospital x-ray unit on-site, while it was also interesting to see that a time capsule was created five years ago, just outside the entrance to the pitch.

A quick trip to Lord's

After leaving Emirates Stadium with plenty to think about, I journeyed to Lord’s, where I met with the Lord’s website manager, who is unavailable when I do the full day with MCC on Monday.

It was a very fruitful discussion and I can see us helping each other a lot in future. Having now seen MCC CEO Keith Bradshaw’s members’ blog, it has convinced me we should be investigating similar functionality for our members.

Of course, my meeting coincided with the conclusion of the MCC v MCC cricket match, which sadly led to a Melbourne loss by six runs under the Duckworth Lewis method. Oh well, at least they put up a better effort than we did four years earlier!

Finally, the day ended with dinner at Lord’s.

More on that in the next post…