Tottenham Is Running the NFL Playbook in North London
LONDON—As he begins the process of designing a new $3.8 billion stadium in Washington D.C., Commanders owner Josh Harris is touring other NFL venues for inspiration. He’s also looking further afield.
The Commanders hosted the Colts on Sunday in north London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, a building that’s already familiar to Harris. It’s the only venue in Europe built specifically to the NFL’s specifications, and it’s on the Commanders’ research list.
“We’ve walked around that stadium a couple times,” Harris said in an interview in London. “What we’re trying to do is take the best of every stadium and bring it to the new site.”
It’s a full circle of inspiration. Not only was the NFL involved in the planning for Tottenham’s stadium, but the league contributed millions to its construction. The 63,000-seat venue, which opened in 2019 at a cost of about $1.3 billion (£1 billion), is the closest any major English soccer team has come to building real estate empire that’s become more and more common in major U.S. sports. As American owners increasingly turn their attention to opportunities in European soccer, the venue is a symbol of how their modern ownership strategies have followed.
Tottenham Hotspur Stadium has roughly 60 suites, thousands of premium seats and a surrounding development that delivers revenue 365 days a year. In one endzone sits the 65-meter Goal Line Bar, the longest bar in Europe. It’s a far cry from the intimate, brick-and-bleacher venues that used to define English soccer, and still do from many of even the country’s most prominent teams.
The venue has transformed Tottenham’s business. During the 2016-2017 season, the club’s last year at a reduced-capacity White Hart Lane, the team reported about $58.9 million (£45.3 million) in matchday revenue from Premier League games and other competitions, according to annual financial statements. In 2024-25, the most recent fiscal year available, that had nearly tripled to $173.3 million (£126.5 million).
Other income streams have jumped at similar rates. In that same span the team’s sponsorship and hospitality revenue rose from $78.9 million (£60.7 million) to $219.2 million (£160 million), and merchandise sales rose from $18.2 million (£14 million) to $53.8 million (£39.3 million).
Then there’s a brand new line-item, which didn’t exist 10 years ago on the team’s annual financials. It covers non-soccer events like NFL games and concerts, as well as sales from adjacent business on the stadium grounds, which include fan tours, a rooftop skywalk attraction and an F1-branded go kart track. Those combined for another $105.9 million (£77.3 million) in revenue last year.
It’s all helped make Tottenham one of the most valuable soccer clubs in the world. The team is worth $3.5 billion, according to Sportico’s most recent numbers, which ranks 10th in the sport globally.
From the outside Tottenham’s stadium looks out of place. On the drive up from central London, it’s visible for more than a mile before arrival, resembling a space ship looming over a working class neighborhood of Caribbean, African, and Turkish communities. From the stadium’s seats, the view would feel far more familiar to any domestic NFL fan, with its individual seats, glass suites, 270-degree led boards, video screens, and various field-level boxes. It looks like an NFL venue.
Inside the building, the involvement from the world’s richest sports league is also clear. Underneath the soccer club’s natural grass surface is an artificial turf field that’s built to NFL specifications, and the U.S. league has a hospitality area, called the Commissioner’s Suite, which it can use for all events at the venue, not just its own games.
The stadium also has two NFL-sized locker rooms, a much larger build than the ones used by the soccer club, due to in part to bigger rosters, bigger players and bigger equipment. (Tottenham uses those NFL locker rooms for additional hospitality when they’re not in use, a practice that the NFL reverses with the soccer locker room during its games in the venue). That may sound like a small thing, but when the NFL began playing games in Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca, it had to drill through bedrock to build temporary locker rooms outside the venue, according to Henry Hodgson, the GM of the NFL’s U.K. business.
“So, we’re going from blasting through volcanic rock, which is not the most efficient way to be doing things, to working with clubs as they develop their stadiums,” Hodgson said in an interview at the venue before the Colts-Commanders game. The NFL is currently in the middle of 10-year deal with Tottenham, since extended, that will see at least two regular season games there through 2029.
Real Madrid recently renovated its Bernabéu stadium with the intention to have it used for American football. That venue hosted its first game last year and will host the Atlanta Falcons and Cincinnati Bengals next month, though it does not have permanent NFL-sized locker rooms. Hodgson said the Tottenham model—a soccer team’s multipurpose venue that the NFL helps finance and outfit—could be a “blueprint” for the league elsewhere, either in other countries or other U.K. cities outside London.
For now, Tottenham Hotspur Stadium stands alone. And while the Commanders may take some ideas back across the Atlantic, there’s one feature that Harris knows he can’t copy.
