Fight to land Beyonce and Taylor Swift is sport’s new battleground
Sir Jim Ratcliffe is not your typical Taylor Swift or Beyoncé fan. The Manchester United co-owner is more likely to be caught relaxing on his private jet to the works of Mozart than dad-dancing to Shake It Off or Single Ladies. But if the promotional video for United’s planned £2 billion new home is anything to go by, the 72-year-old knows that if it is truly to become the “Wembley of the North”, it will need to be as much a Theatre of Dreams for the world’s biggest pop stars as the planet’s greatest footballers.
For, while Wembley is the spiritual home of the beautiful game, it is also a mecca of live music – as famed for staging the likes of Live Aid and this year’s Oasis reunion as England’s 1966 World Cup triumph and the FA Cup final. It has hosted hundreds of concerts and is even on course to hold more gigs than football matches in 2025. A record 26 are currently scheduled after it received permission to stage a further eight non-football events a year.
Others are casting jealous eyes at the national stadium, with Bill Sweeney, the Rugby Union chief executive, this week threatening to take England matches to Birmingham or Milton Keynes if the Allianz Stadium remained blocked from putting on more than three concerts per annum.
United have been even more starved of live music, with Old Trafford only ever staging one concert, as part of the Rolling Stones’ 2018 tour. The impact on the pitch was so severe, United ruled out holding one again in a stadium that has now been deemed unfit for purpose, even for football. This means they have been missing out on a gig economy that can generate an estimated seven figures per show in rental fees alone. Hardly ideal for a club Ratcliffe claimed last week would have been “bust at Christmas” if he had not cut hundreds of jobs, forced staff to count screws and return Sellotape, and raised ticket prices for fans.
From once leading the way when it came to sweating their assets, United now find themselves behind not only Wembley in monetising their own home but some of their main Premier League rivals. No one more so than Tottenham Hotspur, who may have been almost as much of a basket case on the pitch this season, but are the polar opposite in a highly lucrative sideline. The club’s £1 billion stadium and its retractable pitch were designed specifically for staging non-football events like concerts. As it stands, the stadium will host 15 gigs this summer, three times as many as last year. Nearly half of those are part of 2025’s most hotly anticipated world tour, Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour, the dates for which were announced this month.
By comparison, Liverpool are staging six concerts this summer, including two nights of Bruce Springsteen, and title rivals Arsenal are hosting two Robbie Williams shows. Manchester City, who usually average a handful of gigs a year, are currently unable to hold any – including the Oasis reunion tour – owing to expansion work on the Etihad Stadium. Chelsea, on the other hand, have only ever staged music concerts at Stamford Bridge’s 550-capacity indoor venue, Under the Bridge.
Outside the Premier League’s “Big Six”, West Ham United’s publicly owned London Stadium home has two concerts this summer – plans for Rihanna to make that eight were thrown into doubt last week – but their tenancy agreement does not entitle them to any of the revenue. Aston Villa have three, including Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath’s final show, Newcastle United also have three, as do Everton as part of their “Farewell To Goodison Festival”. As revealed by Telegraph Sport, Newcastle are leaning towards building a new stadium some fans have already dubbed the “Wembley of the North East”, with concerts doubtless central to any development. The new Everton Stadium, meanwhile, has already obtained a licence to stage up to four non-football events a year from next summer.
That is still a long way short of the cap imposed on Wembley and Spurs, who were last year granted permission to increase the number of equivalent events they held to 54 (up from 46) and 30 (from 16), respectively. Wembley applied for an increase after it invested in a “lay and play” pitch that is now grown off site. Tottenham did so upon breaching their licence by selling a fifth date to Beyoncé’s 2023 Renaissance World Tour.
Both Wembley and Spurs refused to comment on how much they made per concert.Indeed, Kieran Maguire, the University of Liverpool’s football finance guru, told Telegraph Sport that income clubs or stadiums earned from gigs was “a closely guarded secret”. According to industry experts, that income comes mainly from stadium rental fees and sometimes deals done on catering or merchandise. But not from tickets themselves, proceeds from which go to artists and their promoters. That means clubs typically earn significantly less from a concert than from football fixtures that can net the biggest teams an average of up to £5 million in match-day revenue. Yet, this is generated on events covering only a tiny fraction of the year. “Football is the dumbest business in the world,” Maguire said. “You’ve got expenses 365 days of the year. And you’ve got revenue for 25 to 30. You wouldn’t run any other business like that.”
Competition between clubs to sign up the most sought-after pop and rock acts is not as fierce as might be expected given team rivalries both on and off the pitch, including for player signings. While there may be some bragging rights to be earned in landing an Oasis or Beyoncé, capacity and availability have a much bigger influence on where artists play than any bidding war between venues. If an act is big enough to sell almost 100,000 tickets for a single gig, a promoter’s first port of call in the UK tends to be Wembley. Hence Taylor Swift playing a record-equalling eight nights there during her Eras Tour last summer and Coldplay attempting to beat that with 10 this year. Two years ago, Beyoncé ended up taking the Renaissance World Tour to the 62,850-seat Tottenham Hotspur Stadium after the World Cup in Qatar resulted in a clash with that season’s later-than-usual FA Cup and play-off finals. Her return to London in June similarly overlaps with rugby league’s Challenge Cup final at Wembley.
Telegraph Sport has been told initial discussions about booking the national stadium can take place as far as three years in advance, although no contracts are signed until the “routing” of a tour is locked down. Jon Collins is the chief executive of Live, which represents the UK’s live music business. He described a stadium tour as a “jigsaw puzzle” of dates and locations. He added: “If that artist can only be in the North West for those two dates and there’s something else happening at that stadium then they’re out of the reckoning.”
Footballing allegiance can be another factor in choosing a venue. Hence Oasis having previously played at both the Etihad and Maine Road and Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath choosing Villa Park for their farewell gig. This summer’s three St James’ Park concerts are all headlined by Sam Fender. Go back further and you have Kaiser Chiefs playing Elland Road, Kasabian at the King Power Stadium, Fatboy Slim the Amex, and Sir Elton John – you guessed it – at Vicarage Road. There was talk last year of Adele headlining the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium this summer, while Ed Sheeran has pledged to play Portman Road after his three-year world tour finishes in September. What chance Sir Paul McCartney being lured to Everton’s new stadium after his home city missed out during his own recent world tour?
It is the character of Jim Morrison’s ghost who says in Wayne’s World, “If you book them, they will come”, after telling the hero of the movie to organise his own music festival. The same mantra now applies to concerts at football stadia, to which artists are increasingly turning in order to maximise their own income (Swift’s Eras Tour generated a record £1.62 billion in revenue). Collins said: “There’s only a limited number of nights they can be in the UK on their world tour. So, how do you put yourself in front of the most number of fans in the shortest period of time? That’s where the logic of a stadium show comes from.” The clamour for tickets for those shows has also yet to peak, according to Collins, who added: “We’re in a period of unprecedented demand to see what we would call stadium-level artists.”
That makes the only losers in this space those clubs, like United, who stage no concerts at all. More than half of Premier League teams currently do not have any gigs scheduled this summer despite most previously hosting them. This means missing out on revenue that could be spent on squad building, which doubles as allowable additional income under the Premier League’s profitability and sustainability rules (PSR). Everton and Nottingham Forest were both docked points last season for breaching those rules by £16.6 million and £34.5 million, respectively, for the three years ending 2022-23. With PSR assessments for the period ending 2023-24 having been carried out last month, it may not be a coincidence that Forest’s City Ground hosted its first concerts for almost two decades in May when Take That played two nights there.
PSR was meant to have been replaced last season with a system of squad-cost controls but its introduction has been delayed by various legal challenges. They include from City, who have already managed to get Premier League associated party transaction (APT) regulations ruled unlawful after certain elements were found to be anti-competitive. A senior figure at one top-flight club told Telegraph Sport he was not convinced income generated by concerts should be allowable under PSR, claiming Spurs had an advantage in being able to stage so many of them.
To compound what is an increasingly unlevel playing field, some stadiums do not necessarily have the surrounding infrastructure to support hosting major concerts as regularly as the likes of Tottenham. There can also be local opposition to gigs that often do not finish until 11pm and require a clean-up operation akin to a football match. Spurs’ application to almost double their number of non-football events was granted only after they agreed to pay £4,000 towards the cost to Haringey Council of staging each additional one. Last year, Real Madrid were forced to cancel or reschedule all concerts at the redeveloped Bernabéu after local people complained that a series of loud, late gigs had turned the arena into a “torture-drome”.
With concerts also comes the scourge of ticket touting, which – unlike for football matches – is not illegal in the UK, and the almost equally reviled dynamic pricing. It is not uncommon for sold-out stadium gigs to be plagued by empty seats due to the resulting sky-high cost of tickets. And while this does not affect ticket revenues or facility fees, it can on the sale of food, drink and merchandise for which clubs sometimes agree a share of any profits. To that end, the Government announced plans to cap the price of ticket resales in a move welcomed by Collins and doubtless also by artists and venue owners.
All this will be music to the ears of Ratcliffe following last week’s announcement that United were building a new 100,000-seat stadium to replace Old Trafford. With a promotional video for the project showing the venue in “concert mode”, expect the world’s biggest acts to flock there when it finally opens. Although, definitely maybe not Oasis.
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