Wembley (No) Way

The new national football stadium at Wembley is a magnificent edifice, as it well should be, at a cost not far short of a billion pounds. But it's in an awful location, stuck in a netherworld of warehouses and retail outlets near the chaotic North Circular Road.

When plans to rebuild the stadium were under discussion, there were suggestions that it be moved to somewhere nearer the centre of the UK -- Birmingham, for example. (There were also suggestions that we could do without a national stadium altogether, as many other countries do, but that's another story). The Football Association insisted on going ahead with Wembley, partly on the grounds that it has such good public transport links: two Tube lines and two railway lines within reasonable walking distance. So confident were they about this that they deliberately excluded any improvements in road access or parking from the scheme. Vehicular access to the stadium area is via a baffling maze of unimproved streets, jammed with traffic heading to the nearby Ikea and Tesco. There are about 500 parking spaces available for public use at the Wembley Arena, but these are reserved for VIP parking when the stadium itself is in use.

This evening England play Andorra at Wembley. The tube lines are closed, or at best operating a very restricted service, thanks to a strike. No worries though: the surface trains are still operating....but wait! Both of the train operators are suspending services to the Wembley stations -- starting eight hours ahead of the game in one case! -- because of concerns about overcrowding. You or I might think that privately-run businesses, which these train operators are, would see this as an opportunity to make some extra money by running as many extra trains as they can get their hands on. That's what British Rail used to do in the old days. But it's not how the industry works any more. These days they only run extra trains if someone promises a bigger subsidy.

The FA has had to promise refunds to anyone with a ticket to this evening's game who can't get there because of the transport mess. If 30,000 people stay home, that could cost the FA a million pounds, cash which it desperately needs to pay off its Wembley-related debts. Maybe Birmingham wasn't such a bad idea after all.