Tottenham Hotspur's Stadium Plans: A Northumberland Development Project Refresher

There's been a lot of talk on the site of late about the Northumberland Development Project (NDP) and why/how it is important for Tottenham Hotspur. Let's take a quick moment to go through a refresher on what the NDP is and the move to its significance.

First, the NDP involves not only a new stadium for Spurs, but also a complete redevelopment of the area around the stadium. The plans include public spaces and squares in the area around the stadium. These would include two amphitheaters for community events and activities. There would also be a new hotel, a supermarket, offices for the Tottenham Hotspur Foundation, a Club Museum, 450 new homes, and other infrastructure improvements.

The stadium, in it's most resent design plan would seat 58,237 (for reference, White Hart Lane hold 36,230) and once completed would make it the third largest stadium in the Premier League, trailing only Manchester United and Arsenal (White Hart Lane is currently the 10th largest).

I'm sure that you can work out why the capacity increase is important, but let's walk through it. The club, back in 2009, had 70,000 club members and a waiting list of 23,000 people for season tickets. Let's assume that the club Champions League debut has had some impact on that and now the numbers are closer to 75,000 and 25,000. That's 25,000 people that want to buy season tickets, but cannot because we simply do not have enough seats for them.

No we're going to do a little math. I could list out all the season ticket prices or we can just go with a "high average" of £800. Given our waiting list of 25,000 fans that's £20 million that the Club could earn every year. That's a pretty nice sum, but when you also factor in the amount of money the additional people in the stands will spend on food and beverages, merchandise, etc. the income for the rest of the season could (potentially) double.

For the purposes of this exercise let's be more conservative and say that the new stadium would earn the club, on average, £30 million more per season than the current one. That's enough money to increase the wage budget by £576,000 per week or enough to buy one really good striker.

The problem, of course, is that the current plans have been delayed. Originally the plans called for construction to begin in 2010 and be completed by 2013. We're now looking at 2015 being the possible completion date and that is just enough time for other clubs to put even more distance between between themselves and us. Something needs to happen on this soon. The money could certainly go a long way.