9th March: New Wembley Stadium

On this date in 2007 New Wembley Stadium opened on the site of the original Wembley Stadium, which was demolished in 2003. The stadium hosts home matches of the England national Football team, and the FA Cup Final. It's also the temporary home of Premier League football club Tottenham Hotspur while their new stadium is being built. Here are some facts about the new Wembley Stadium.

1. Its circumference is 1 km (0.62 miles) and its volume is 4,000,000 cubic metres, which means you could park 25,000 double decker buses in it. it is the largest football stadium in England, the largest stadium in the UK and the second-largest stadium in Europe.
2. The roof covers 11 acres. It's a sliding roof, to ensure that spectators don't get rained on while sunlight can still reach the pitch to allow the grass to grow.
3. The supporting arch on the roof was made in Darlington from British steel and transported to Wembley to be constructed on site. It is the world's longest unsupported roof structure. Its vital statistics: 7 m (23 ft) internal diameter with a 315 m (1,033 ft) span, erected some 22° off true, and rising to 133 m (436 ft) - tall enough to require warning beacons for low flying aircraft. To give you an even better idea of how big it is - you could roll the London Eye underneath it with room to spare, and easily drive a Eurostar train through it.
4. It has a seating capacity of 90,000 and much more roomy than the seats in the stadium it replaced. Seats in the new stadium are 50 centimetres wide and 80 centimetres deep, compared to 41 x 64 cm in the old Wembley. This means an average Joe watching the cup final has more leg room than they would have had in the Royal Box in Old Wembley.
5. The stadium has ninety-eight kitchens, a banqueting hall big enough to park a jumbo jet in, and there are 2,618 toilets, which means Wembley Stadium has more Toilets than any other venue in the world.
6. The playing pitch in the new Wembley is lower than the old one. When they were excavating the pitch, workers found the foundations of Watkin's Tower, which was basically a failed attempt to build London its own Eiffel Tower. Only the base was built before they gave up and built the old Wembley Stadium on top of it.
7. Some Wembley firsts. The first football match in the new stadium was a private match between Multiplex and Wembley Stadium staff. The first match in front of an audience was between the Geoff Thomas Foundation Charity XI and the Wembley Sponsors Allstars. The first match involving professional teams was England U21s vs Italy U21s on 24 March 2007. Italian striker Giampaolo Pazzini was the first professional footballer to score a goal there and the first English player to score was David Bentley, though there is an unknown amateur player out there somewhere, whose name we're not told, who would have scored the actual first goal. The first FA Cup Final at the new Wembley was between Manchester United and Chelsea on 19 May 2007. Chelsea won 1–0 and Didier Drogba was the first player to score in the FA Cup final at the new Wembley.
8. It's not just a venue for soccer. American football is played there, too. The first NFL match was on 28 October 2007 between the New York Giants and the Miami Dolphins. This was the first first regular season NFL game ever to be played outside of North America. The first touchdown scored at Wembley was by Giants' quarterback Eli Manning. Rugby League is played there, too and in 2014 it hosted its first boxing match between Carl Froch and George Groves, which also broke the British post-war attendance record for a boxing event. It's not even all about sport. It's a Music venue too. For concerts, the pitch is covered, providing standing space for another 25,000 people. The first concert at the new stadium was given by George Michael on 9 June 2007.
9. The stadium cost £798 million and was partly funded by the National Lottery. The Lottery made it a condition of funding that the stadium could be used for athletics, so there is a system whereby platforms can be added to achieve this, although it would mean losing about 30,000 seats and cost millions of pounds over several weeks to set up. This may be why no athletics events have taken place there yet, and none are scheduled.
10. The statue outside the entrance is of Bobby Moore, who was the captain of the England team who won the World Cup in 1966. The statue was sculpted by Philip Jackson and unveiled by Sir Bobby Charlton.

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