Tottenham's new stadium to include micro-brewery and allow fans to watch players in the tunnel
One-way glass will separate Harry Kane, Dele Alli and their team-mates from 'Tunnel Club' fans
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Your support makes all the difference.Fans at the new White Hart Lane will be able to see into the players’ tunnel before, during and after games, an unprecedented step for a Premier League side. But manager Mauricio Pochettino, who knows what happens when tensions spill over into the tunnel, laughed that it might not be such a good idea.
“It’s dangerous, dangerous,” Pochettino joked at his press conference on Thursday. “Because there have been a lot of things in the tunnel. It is for that reason that it will be very expensive.”
There will be one-way glass separating the Tunnel Club from the tunnel itself, meaning that the fans can see the players but the players will not be distracted by them.
There will also be player-level seats there set just behind Pochettino’s dug-out and technical area. One ticket in the Tunnel Club will initially cost £339 for each game, not including VAT, not including membership fee. Season tickets there cost £9,500 but can only be bought in pairs, not individually, so start at £19,000.
The Tunnel Club is not the most expensive part of the new White Hart Lane. That will be the H Club, a member’s club with Michelin star dining. But it will be the most unusual and most impressive part of the new White Hart Lane, plans for which were revealed in greater details than ever before at the old White Hart Lane on Thursday. The new stadium will open in just 18 months’ time, in August 2018, and will be the biggest club stadium in London, holding 61,000 people.
The stadium has been designed to maintain the best elements of the current White Hart Lane, which it is immediately adjacent to. That means that the front row of seats will all be between five and eight metres away from the pitch, as they are at the current ground, closer than is often the case at new stadiums.
Attempts to retain the White Hart Lane atmosphere mean that the three tiers of the ground will be tightly packed on top of each other and the architectural highlight is the 17,000 seater south stand which is one single tier. It will naturally earn comparisons to the Kop at Anfield or the Yellow Wall at the Westfalenstadion in Dortmund, its obvious inspiration. It is a vindication of the decision not to wrap premium seating all the way around the ground, instead keeping it on the east and west sides of the ground, thereby keeping the ends behind the goals for the general admission fans.
The hope is that it will be a modern statement with a traditional atmosphere, the hardest balance to strike in 21st century football. Fittingly enough, then, it will have the world’s first stadium micro-brewery, producing 1,000,000 pints of craft beer each year, with a delivery system delivering 10,000 pints per minute.
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