Tottenham announce plans to increase new stadium capacity

The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is already larger than Arsenal’s home ground, The Emirates. Now Spurs want to make it (marginally) even bigger. Today the club announced that it has submitted an application to the local council to increase the stadium capacity by an additional 241 seats.

241 seats isn’t a lot, but it does seem to represent a certain optimism that Tottenham Hotspur is in good, healthy shape, and that there’s demand for more attendance at Spurs matches, even considering this season’s blip in performance. Football clubs usually don’t add seats to the stadium if they’re not feeling as though they can sell tickets to get butts in those seats. That’s because there is a danger — increase the stadium capacity by too much and suddenly the capacity exceeds demand and people stop buying season tickets because they know they can walk up and buy one on match day.

In the release, the club stated that the additional seats will be added to the season ticket allocations in the sections where those seats are being added.

It could also reflect Spurs’ continued interest in hosting non-Premier League matches like the NFL or rugby league events — this year’s NFL contests weren’t quite technically sold out, but the attendances were above 60k for each game. 241 more seats isn’t a lot of revenue, but it’s nothing to sneeze at over the long term.

So hooray for fiscal optimism, and hooray for still having a larger stadium than Arsenal!