Turf under grass: How the NFL and Tottenham collaborated on a stadium fit for football … and football

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LONDON — European soccer stadiums traditionally do not allow fans to bring beer to their seats.

But Tottenham Hotspur Stadium was built and managed, in collaboration with the NFL, with American football games and crowds in mind.

So be assured, Giants and Packers fans: you can bring your pint back into the stands during Sunday’s game between these 3-1 NFC teams.

“We are not a part of that stipulation,” NFL VP of operations Matt Joyce said Friday with a smile. “It’s relatively close from an experience point of view to what you expect in the U.S. Definitely, you can bring your beer, you can bring your pretzels. And that’s what the fans are looking for, right? They want that slice of the NFL in their backyard.”

That’s a minor adjustment to protocol in the grand scheme, but it’s one example of how attentive Tottenham and the NFL were to creating an authentic American football experience at a venue that typically hosts one of the English Premier League’s most recognizable clubs.

The most impressive part of the NFL/Tottenham collaboration is how the reportedly $1 billion stadium was constructed ― and how it gets transformed —  for its two NFL games each year.

The league invested millions in a 10-year partnership that began in 2019, and it shows.

“Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is the first stadium to be purpose-built for the NFL outside of the U.S.,” Tottenham stadium director Jon Babbs said.

Start with the playing surface: Hotspur play their soccer matches here on a grass pitch.

But when NFL football comes to town, the stadium’s grass field slides out underneath the South Stand to reveal a full artificial turf surface below to host the American games.

“It’s there already,” Joyce said of the turf. “And that’s the brilliance of the design: we don’t have to do a huge amount to change out the field.”

The grass field actually splits into three sections and slides on “railway tracks” under a “pitch pocket” beneath the South Stand, Joyce and Babbs explained. The turf below is about 70% complete, so staff then covers the remaining 30% with turf, levels it out, and grooms it.

It is “the world’s first dividing, retractable grass surface,” even more complex than the Arizona Cardinals’ State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., which slides its full grass field outside in one shot.

Concrete pillars supporting one of the largest single stands in Europe made it necessary for the engineers and architects to find a creative way to move the field out.

So two “hydraulic” flaps bordering the grass field fold up and slide down to the NFL turf level, then the three sections are moved out, which takes no longer than four hours.

Then, while resting underneath the stands, “the grass surface receives day-to-day monitoring from our groundstaff, with the help of electric mowers, sprinklers and LED grow lighting,” Babbs said.

So Harry Kane will be none the wiser when he suits up for his next Spurs match.

“This means the NFL and the range of other major events held at the stadium have no negative impact on our ability to stage soccer matches at all,” Babbs said.

All told, it’s about a 48-hour conversion process, along with due diligence on health and safety.

“We test it just as we do in the U.S.,” Joyce said. “We have independent assessors that come in like they do in the U.S. to assess the field to make sure it’s ready for Sunday.”

The NFL has been playing games in London since 2007, when the Giants won the first game over the Dolphins at Wembley Stadium. So it learned a lot that could enhance Tottenham Stadium’s specifications.

For example, soccer stands go all the way down to field level. But NFL fans can’t sit that low because they can’t see over the players.

So instead of covering those low seats with a tarp, Tottenham stadium has a tray system that removes some seats and automatically creates a 6-to-7 foot wall.

“The beauty of being in-market for Europe as long as we have is we’ve had a lot of insight on how to help design a stadium, with our good partners at Tottenham and the architects, to get the best of both worlds,” Joyce said. “It wasn’t about one sport over another but what’s ideal for both.”

The playing surface is only one of the stadium’s features that serve both the Tottenham soccer games and NFL football. Joyce pointed to the locker rooms as a key area augmented due to the needs of teams like the Giants and Packers.

“We have 65 lockers, 75 lockers in a home locker room here that is just ready to go year-round,” Joyce said. “That’s not a traditional thing you’d have in a normal soccer stadium. There’s 25-30 people in a squad on [soccer] teams. [But in the NFL], there’s 140 people traveling and there’s 65-76 people sitting down and changing.”

The league actually brought in some NFL teams’ equipment managers during the planning and construction phases to solicit advice on design and essential needs.

Tottenham officials, architects and engineers also visited a lot of NFL stadiums in the United States to see for themselves how the buildings were different, from locker rooms to power sources to sideline space.

The result? Tottenham’s home locker room side covers literally an entire sideline, from doctors and coaches’ offices to changing rooms, trainers’ and treatment tables, cold tubs and more. Then there’s a 65-person away locker room, which the visiting Giants will call home on Sunday.

The NFL won’t disclose its exact investment in Tottenham’s stadium, but ESPN reported an initial investment of almost $13 million in 2017 and said the league pays Tottenham a fee for each game it hosts.

And how’s this for an investment? NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said at a fan event on Saturday that he believes London could support “two franchises” and admitted it’s a possibility that he’d consider a European division in the future.

“That’s part of what we’re doing, right?” Goodell said in London. “We’re trying to sort of see, could you have multiple locations in Europe where you could have an NFL franchise? Because it would be easier as a division.”

Having a stadium like Tottenham Hotspur makes statements like this actually seem plausible.

The stadium has high end zone camera positions integrated into its design so the NFL can shoot from both the end zones and the 50-yard line up top.

Its Stratus Club, a luxury hospitality area at the top of the stadium for guests at Spurs’ games, converts into two 11-seat coaches’ booths for NFL games, and erects a temporary wall system to house separate spaces for instant replay, NFL health and safety, game operations and more.

There are dedicated elevators — or lifts ― for the coaches, plus radio booths

“We’re reusing the space in a clever way to ensure we get all the function we need,” Joyce said.

And of course, security was a priority in this stadium’s construction, as well.

“The protocols we have as best practice of security in the U.S., Tottenham were open to looking into that best practice and understanding how they could adopt it,” Joyce said. “So we shared a lot of collective investment in things that they would adopt for the soccer games as well as our football games.”

That included the installation of magnetometers, or the metal detecting archways you’d see in an airport, as fans enter. The NFL wanted that measure, so now Tottenham has integrated that into their security for soccer matches, as well.

One main difference in security protocol is that the NFL doesn’t allow bags in, or getting close to any lines entering the stadium, as a protection. “That’s one of the things we do that they probably don’t do locally,” he said, “but it’s a very different U.K. to U.S. security profile.”

All of this is to ensure international fans get the true NFL experience. And nowhere is that more obvious than the stadium’s cavernous NFL Shop, which is accessible from both the street and inside the stadium.

“Our fans, what we have learned in the years, they just arrive really early,” Joyce said. “Our game is 2:30 p.m. on the weekend, they’ll be [here] by 9:30, as soon as the shop opens. And they’ll be in there and we’ll have queues all the way up until game time.”

“It’s unlike any other U.K. sport,” Joyce said. “It’s 3 hours before the game you can be enjoying it, 3 hours of the game, a 6-7 hour experience versus more traditional sports that are shorter. Our fans come and enjoy it all the way through.

“And it’s great.”