Football’s hostile environments can start at home | Andrew Anthony
What’s in a football stadium? Essentially the stands and the pitch. You could add the fans, of course, and inedible burgers, but they are transportable. However, there seems to be some mysterious process by which the fans interact with the stadium to create what is widely known as the “atmosphere”.
Hence, although the West Ham fans attending the London Stadium in Stratford are largely the same as the those who attended the Boleyn Ground last season (except there’s more of them now), the atmosphere by general consent has not been conducive to winning. Or not losing.
West Ham have lost five games in the larger new stadium this season, having lost only three all of last season at the tightly constructed old ground. And they have suffered some real spankings at home, too. This is not an isolated phenomenon either. Look at Arsenal during Arsène Wenger’s reign. Since he joined the club in 1996 the team have won three Premier League titles – all of them while the club was housed at Highbury. Since the club moved around the corner in 2006 to the larger, much more luxurious and revenue-spinning Emirates Stadium, the team’s highest finish has been second – that was last year when Spurs suffered the footballing equivalent of a nervous breakdown and handed second spot to their bitter rivals.
Coincidence?
Talking of Spurs, they have a fabulous home record this year. They are unbeaten, winning all but two games. That is home at White Hart Lane. They have also had another home, however, for European games: Wembley. They lost twice there, going out of the Champions League, and could only draw on Thursday against lowly Gent, sending them out of the Europa League. There was a record (for the Europa League) 80,000 fans at Wembley to watch Spurs’ demise. As Harry Kane said before the game, that’s “incredible”. With almost three times the capacity, he reckoned, the national stadium was even better than White Hart Lane. Yes, for Gent.
So what’s going on?
The first thing to say is that footballers are notoriously superstitious. The kind of people who take their shirts off walking down the tunnel and fold their kit in the changing room in exactly the same way for each game, are not likely to be immune to the psychological effect of wholly different surroundings.
After all, why do most clubs have a better home than away record? The answer seems to be that they are used to their surroundings and feel energised by a partisan crowd. There is, of course, an argument that says they ought to be sufficiently energised by the six-figure sums they are trousering each week, regardless of what is going on in the stands.
But footballers are only human and most humans do not respond well to hostile environments. Or at least they can get nervous about visiting The Den, home of Millwall FC. I remember going there about 15 years ago as an incognito neutral fan. I say I remember, I still wake sweating about it in the middle of the night.
Therefore I have some sympathy for Ben Chilwell, the Leicester left-back, who was alleged to be too intimidated by the Millwall fans to take throw-ins. However, if the secret of football success is to have a small ground with over-enthusiastic fans who are close enough to the play to paralyse a left-back’s throwing fingers, then Millwall would not be struggling for a promotion place in League One and would not have lost at home this season to Shrewsbury Town and Rochdale.
In other words, the idea of plucky fortresses is something of a myth. It really works only if the opposition buy into the myth. But myths can possess potency. Bill Shankly arranged for the famous This Is Anfield sign to be affixed to the tunnel leading from the dressing rooms to the pitch at Liverpool, with the successful intention of making visiting players focus on the daunting fact of the surroundings. Then, of course, the even more famous Kop did its part.
But were they really more vocal than, say, Everton fans or did everyone – including the fans themselves – fall for the legend? Whatever the answer, frenzied atmospheres tend to go with frenzied football. I remember watching a match at Barcelona’s Camp Nou with around 99,000 other fans. I have heard more noise generated in the stalls at an opera. The team went about its business of patient geometric passing without any distraction from the crowd, except when it stood up and waved hankies to protest at a poor period of play.
The other thing I noticed in the Camp Nou was what seemed to be the vastness of the pitch. Football pitches, of course, are allowed to vary considerably in size. White Hart Lane, for example, is smaller in area than Wembley. One of the explanations I have heard for Tottenham’s drop in form at the latter is that their pressing game was not so effective in the increased space.
At the beginning of the 2018-19 season Spurs are due to move into their new stadium, next door to White Hart Lane. Having not won three titles in the past few years they are not under threat of a sudden end to success. But will it affect the team negatively? The stadium has been designed with steep rising stands to create a compact feel for a place that will hold 61,000 – more Bernabéu than Camp Nou.
One reason Wembley feels a bit dead, aside from the laboured football that England often produce, is that the terraces recline at a low gradient, which makes for a comfortable seating arrangement but a less intense crowd experience. The new Spurs stadium will boast the largest single-tier stand in the UK. Of course, 61,000 braying supporters will provide more oomph than the 36,000 (now reduced to 31,000) of White Hart Lane. Unless, that is, Spurs start losing. Then home advantage becomes a curse. West Ham seem about at home in the London Stadium as I did in The Den.
Another change will be the pitch. Although they can vary wildly, there is in fact a standardised Uefa and Fifa specification of 105 metres by 68 metres. That will be the size of the new Spurs pitch (and also the size of the Camp Nou pitch). The current one is five metres shorter and a metre narrower. Will the team disappear in that added square meterage of an average family bathroom?
Only time will tell.
But it would be a strange irony in these days of a global league with players from all over the planet that shifting a ground 100 metres could cause havoc with a team’s home form.