Premier League football in London doesn’t only make money for its top flight clubs - currently Arsenal, Chelsea, Crystal Palace, Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham United - and their players, but also for the capital as a whole. Away fans travelling to the capital’s Premier League grounds spend over £134m a season on transport, accommodation and food and drink in London, according to one report. Visitors from the West Midlands and Merseyside will be pouring into Croydon and Islington for the new season’s first weekend.
London’s football grounds make their own impact on the capital’s economy, not least as drivers of major development schemes. The new season, kicking off on Saturday, sees West Ham moving in to the converted 2012 Olympic stadium in Stratford and work commencing on transforming Spurs’s White Hart Lane stadium into a plush 61,000-seater as part of a wider regeneration project. Meanwhile, in the Championship, Queens Park Rangers are aiming to build a big time future with a brand new ground in the huge Old Oak and Park Royal site, and League One AFC Wimbledon are seeking to return to their forebear club’s original home.
Stadium moves and upgrades excite mixed emotions, and their value to local areas and people is contested and unclear: a London Assembly report published last year said “the enhanced regeneration effects of stadia over other developments are as yet unproven” and stressed the need for public bodies - borough councils and mayors - to see that the benefits are maximised. The tensions between the desire for change and success and the countervailing power of territorialism and nostalgia are vividly illuminated by football.
This last point provides a shameless pretext for a sometimes muddy trip down memory lane. The first part of London Weekend Television’s 21 Years of London Football 1968-89 is 27 minutes long, so make sure you’re sitting comfortably.
And, yes, there is a Part Two. Find it here. Finally, coming more up to date, a montage of views, uploaded in 2009, from Arsenal and Spurs fans about visiting other London clubs. Not always polite. Maybe some things don’t change all that much.
At home in the Premier League this weekend, Palace host West Bromwich Albion on Saturday and Arsenal are visited by Liverpool on Sunday, followed by Chelsea playing West Ham at Stamford Bridge on Monday evening in the new Premier League season’s first London derby. Also at home in London on Saturday are Championship Brentford, League One Charlton and Wimbledon and League Two Barnet and Leyton Orient.
