Spurs would find it 'incredibly hard' to build their stadium for £1.2bn today - which highlights the rise in construction costs that Newcastle United would face with any redevelopment of St James' Park.
That is according to Jonathan Turner, who is a non-executive director at Spurs, after the club started out with a £250m stadium design and plan that ended up coming in at a figure nearly five times that amount. The result? Spurs now boast the second biggest stadium in the Premier League, which is almost twice the capacity of the old White Hart Lane, and the Londoners have made the most of it. In fact, in 2022/23, Spurs brought in £117.6m in match income.
It is worth pointing out that the most affordable adult season ticket at Spurs has since risen to an eye-watering £856, but the club do offer some of the best stadium facilities in the country, including Europe's longest bar and an on-site microbrewery. A typical fan, as a result, will spend around £16 per game as opposed to just under £2 at White Hart Lane.
Spurs have also turned the stadium into a multi-use venue: Beyonce's five-night run last summer was the highest-grossing concert ever staged by a female artist at the time; the arena is the official home of the NFL in the UK and plays host to the world's first F1 branded electric karting experience; and the club are even building a 180-room hotel to support their conference and events business.
No wonder Turner said that the stadium is one of Spurs' 'central pieces' when it comes to 'competing with clubs with more capital' in a PSR world and that is the challenge Newcastle are now facing. Newcastle generated £37.9m in match income in the club's most recently published accounts and CEO Darren Eales has spoken about the need to be 'smart to try to grow our revenue streams'.
Newcastle, who are in the process of building a new seven-day-a-week fan zone, would ideally like to stay put at St James' and the Magpies have tasked world-leading architects to look at what could be possible on the complicated city centre site. Eales previously insisted that 'no conclusions' had been reached ahead of the club's full stadium feasibility report potentially being completed this summer.
It goes without saying that an expansion would be costly in today's climate - let alone a full rebuild - but Newcastle have the owners with the means to potentially bankroll such a project if it comes off whereas Spurs executive director Donna-Maria Cullen previously revealed that the Londoners did it on 'limited finances'. Turner elaborated further on that point.
"The stadium was financed through internally generated cash flow and also through debt," he told the Business of Sport. "The debt is on a very long-term basis.
"A lot of it is held by pension funds and other institutions who are comfortable holding long-term debt. The stadium was built in a low-interest rate environment. That may be lucky. We have a fixed rate on the vast majority of that. The service cost of the debt and the long-term nature of debt was an incredible financing package that would not be available today.
"It would be incredibly hard to build the stadium today for the cost that it was built....if you were going to do it today, construction costs are higher. Inflation is higher. The cost of interest is higher. It was pretty hard to do in the first place, but I think it would be a harder exercise."