Wembley Stadium as England Home: History and Matchdays
Why Wembley Stadium England home matches happen where they do, plus the FA's ownership, the rebuild, capacity and layout, ticket routes and how to get there.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished England National Team20 min read
- Capacity
- 90,000
- Current stadium opened
- 2007
- Arch span
- 315 metres
- Owned by
- The Football Association
The walk down Olympic Way takes about ten minutes from the top of the ramp at Wembley Park, and for most of that time the arch is the only thing anybody looks at. It spans 315 metres and stands 133 metres above the pitch, and it is doing structural work rather than decorative — it carries the weight of the roof over the north side so that the bowl beneath needs no internal columns and every one of the 90,000 seats has a clean sightline. That was the point of it.
Wembley belongs to the Football Association, held through a subsidiary called Wembley National Stadium Limited, and that single fact explains most of what follows. England play there because the governing body owns the building and keeps the gate. No club takes a cut. No landlord sets the fixture terms. When the FA decides an England match goes somewhere else, it is choosing to forgo income, which is why it happens less often than supporters in the north of England would like.
This page covers how the ground came to hold that position, what the current stadium is actually made of, and the practical business of getting to an England home fixture and inside it.
How Wembley became the national team's recognised home
It was not designed to be. The Empire Stadium was built for the British Empire Exhibition of 1924 and completed the year before, and the FA had no particular claim on it. England's home internationals in the 1920s and 1930s were staged all over the country — Highbury, Goodison Park, Villa Park, Bramall Lane, Roker Park — and the FA moved them around partly to spread the game and partly because no single venue had a monopoly on the crowd.
England first played at Wembley on 12 April 1924, against Scotland. It finished 1-1.
For the next quarter of a century the ground had a narrow role: it hosted the Scotland fixture, which alternated between Wembley and Hampden Park and was the biggest match in the British calendar, and it hosted the FA Cup final. Everything else went elsewhere. The first England international at Wembley against opposition other than Scotland came in 1951, and from that point the FA's use of the ground broadened steadily until, through the 1950s and 1960s, Wembley became the default rather than the exception.
Two events sealed it. The 1948 Olympic Games used Wembley as the main stadium, which established it in the public mind as the country's principal arena rather than a football ground that also did other things. And on 25 November 1953, England lost 3-6 at home to Hungary — the first defeat by continental opposition on English soil, in front of a full house, and a result that changed how English coaching thought about the game. Both fixed Wembley as the place where the national side's reputation was tested.
By 1966 it was beyond argument. The World Cup final of 30 July, England 4-2 against West Germany after extra time, is the only occasion the men's team have won a major tournament, and it happened on that pitch. Everything the ground now carries is downstream of that afternoon, and the account of how England won their only World Cup is really an account of a Wembley campaign.
The Empire Stadium, the twin towers and the rebuild
The 1923 stadium was built quickly — a matter of months, in reinforced concrete, on the site of a failed Victorian tower project — and it opened with the most chaotic event in English football history.
28 April 1923. Bolton Wanderers against West Ham United in the FA Cup final. The official attendance was recorded as 126,047 and the real figure has never been established, because the crowd overwhelmed the turnstiles and spilled onto the pitch before kick-off. The match started three-quarters of an hour late, after mounted police cleared the playing area, and it entered folklore as the White Horse Final because one of the horses — grey, but photographed pale — dominated the newsreel footage. Bolton won 2-0.
The twin domed towers at the north end became the recognisable image of English football for the next seventy-seven years, and their loss was the most contested part of the rebuild. Preservation campaigns argued they could be incorporated. The design team argued they could not be, given the seating bowl geometry a modern all-seater stadium requires. They came down in 2003.
- 1923The Empire Stadium is completed for the British Empire Exhibition and opens with the White Horse Cup final.
- 1924England play their first international there, drawing 1-1 with Scotland.
- 1966The World Cup final is staged at Wembley, England's only major tournament win.
- 2000The last match at the old stadium in October, a 1-0 England defeat to Germany.
- 2002Demolition begins on the site; the twin towers come down the following year.
- 2007The replacement opens, and England play Brazil there in June.
The sequence of the rebuild. Dates are the published milestones, not construction contract dates.
The last night of the old ground was a bleak one. 7 October 2000, a World Cup qualifier against Germany, played in heavy rain. Dietmar Hamann scored from a free-kick, England lost 1-0, and Kevin Keegan resigned as manager in the dressing room afterwards. Seventy-seven years of the stadium's history ended with a defeat and a resignation, which nobody had scripted.
Then came the gap. The FA had a national stadium in pieces and a national team with fixtures to fulfil, and the answer was to take England around the country for six years.
The project that nearly did not happen
The rebuild ran late and ran over, and for a period in the early 2000s it was an open question whether it would proceed at all. The scheme went through several redesigns, an argument about whether the new stadium should include a permanent athletics provision, and a change of contractor arrangement before construction settled. Public money was involved — Sport England put lottery funding into the acquisition of the site — which meant the delays were debated in Parliament as well as in the sports pages.
The delay had a visible consequence beyond London. With no national stadium available, the FA Cup final, the League Cup final, the Community Shield and the Football League play-off finals were all staged at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff from 2001 until the new Wembley was ready. An entire generation of English supporters made their showpiece pilgrimage to Wales, and the play-off finals in particular built a following there that the return to London had to win back. What that meant for the fixture that has since become the most valuable single match in world football is set out in the guide to the play-off final at Wembley.
The stadium eventually opened in 2007, later than every date that had been announced for it, and the first senior England match on the new pitch was a friendly against Brazil on 1 June that year. It finished 1-1. John Terry headed England in front; Brazil equalised late.
Capacity, layout and the design of the current ground
90,000 seats. Three tiers. No columns anywhere in the bowl, which is the arch's entire justification as an engineering solution rather than a landmark.
The design came from Foster and Partners working with Populous, and the brief it answered was demanding in a way that is easy to miss from the outside. A stadium of this size on this site could not use conventional roof trusses without either putting supports in the seating bowl or building an enormous perimeter structure across land the site does not have. The arch, tilted back from vertical, takes the load of the north roof and a substantial part of the south, and transfers it to two abutments. The roof over the southern side moves, partially, to let daylight and air onto the pitch — it is not a closing roof and it never was, whatever the early press coverage suggested.
Inside, the layout is a straightforward bowl with a distinctive middle tier. That middle tier is premium seating, sold as long-term licences under the Club Wembley banner, and the money raised from those licences part-funded the construction. It has consequences for every England match played there, discussed further down this page.
The Royal Box sits at the top of the west stand, reached by 107 steps from pitch level. The old stadium had 39, a number every English schoolchild once knew, and the new count is quoted almost as often. The pitch itself is a hybrid surface, natural grass stitched through with synthetic fibre, and it has been relaid many times — an unusually high number of times in the stadium's early years, when managers were openly critical of its condition.
- 90000Seats
- 315Arch span in metres
- 133Arch height in metres
- 107Steps to the Royal Box
Published design and capacity figures for the football configuration. Concert and other-event capacities differ.
Two details matter to anyone buying a seat rather than admiring the engineering. The upper tier is steep and very high, and the view from the back of it is a genuinely different experience from the view from the lower bowl — comprehensive, distant, and perfectly good for reading a match if not for hearing one. The away allocation for an England fixture sits at one end, kept separate under the segregation arrangements described in the guide to away fan segregation, and for major tournaments UEFA or FIFA rather than the FA determines where the visiting support goes.
The arch is lit at night and its colour is used to mark occasions, which has become part of the stadium's public identity in a way the original design brief did not anticipate. It is visible from a long way across north-west London, and on a matchday it functions as a navigation aid for anyone who has come out of the wrong station.
Everything about the seating is a product of the Taylor Report era and the all-seater requirement that followed it. There is no terracing, and there never has been at the new ground. Rail seating has been introduced at a number of English grounds under the licensing regime described in the guide to safe standing in English stadiums, and Wembley's position on that has moved as the national policy has moved, which is a fair reason to check the current arrangement with the stadium rather than assume it from an older article.
Why England play elsewhere in the country
Between 2001 and 2006 they had no alternative. Every home fixture in that period went to a club ground, and the FA used the enforced tour as a genuine attempt to give the national team a presence outside London. Among the grounds that staged England matches in those years were Old Trafford, Villa Park, St James' Park, Anfield, Elland Road, the Riverside Stadium, Pride Park, Portman Road and St Mary's. Attendances were strong. The atmosphere, by most accounts from the time, was better than what followed.
Since 2007 the reasons have been narrower.
The FA takes the occasional friendly or lower-priority fixture out of London deliberately, to sell tickets in a market that rarely gets an England match and to answer the long-standing complaint that the national side is a London institution. Molineux, Old Trafford and the Riverside have all been used in that way. The women's team plays across the country as a matter of policy rather than exception, which is one of the clearer differences between the two setups and something the account of the Lionesses and England women's history picks up in detail.
There is also the disciplinary route, which nobody plans for. Following crowd disorder at the Euro 2020 final at Wembley in July 2021 — the tournament was played in 2021 despite the name — UEFA imposed sanctions that included matches behind closed doors. England served part of that at Molineux in June 2022, playing a Nations League fixture in an empty stadium. It is the only recent case of an England home match being moved for a reason other than commercial choice, and it is worth remembering when the question of Wembley's crowd comes up.
Matchday for an England home fixture
The stadium opens its turnstiles well before kick-off, and the difference between arriving ninety minutes early and thirty minutes early at Wembley is larger than at almost any club ground in England. Ninety thousand people funnel through a small number of approaches, and the security search is thorough.
Bags are the usual friction point. Wembley operates a restrictive bag policy with a small size limit, no left-luggage facility at the ground, and no realistic storage nearby on a matchday. A rucksack that gets you into a Championship ground on a Saturday will not get you into Wembley, and the queue to be told so is long.
The concourses are wide and the food offering is what a 90,000-seat stadium's food offering always is — high volume, high price, long queues at half-time. The pubs and bars around Wembley Park and along Olympic Way fill from mid-afternoon for an evening kick-off and are frequently one-in-one-out by an hour before the game. The broader question of matchday pubs near English grounds has a specifically Wembley answer, which is that the good ones are further from the stadium than you want them to be.
Kick-off times for England home fixtures are set by UEFA and FIFA for competitive matches, within slots negotiated with broadcasters, so an evening qualifier under the lights is the norm and a weekend afternoon friendly is the exception. Anyone travelling from outside London for a midweek evening game should check the last train before booking, because the answer is often earlier than the final whistle allows for.
Getting to Wembley by train, tube and road
Three stations serve the ground, and they are genuinely different propositions.
Wembley Park is the main one, on the Metropolitan and Jubilee lines, and it delivers you to the top of Olympic Way looking straight down at the arch. It is the busiest and the most managed — expect queuing systems on the way out, and expect them to be enforced. The old raised pedway that used to carry the crowd from the station down towards the stadium was demolished and replaced with a stepped descent, which improved the approach considerably.
Wembley Stadium station is the closest, served by Chiltern Railways from London Marylebone. It is a small station handling a very large crowd, so the walk is short and the wait to board afterwards is not.
Wembley Central sits on the Bakerloo line, the London Overground and the West Midlands and London Northwestern services from the north-west. It is the furthest away and, for exactly that reason, often the least painful way out after a full house.
Driving is a poor idea and the local authority has arranged matters so that it stays one. Brent operates an event-day controlled parking zone across a wide area around the stadium, official parking at the ground is limited and must be arranged in advance, and residential streets within a considerable radius are restricted. Supporters coming any distance are better served by the approaches set out in the guide to train travel to English football matches, which for Wembley usually means a mainline service into Marylebone or Euston and a short hop on from there.
Accessible parking and accessible entry are handled separately by the stadium's disability access team, and the general standards those arrangements are measured against are described in the accessible seating at English football grounds guide.
Ticketing routes and how demand is managed
Almost nothing goes on general sale in the way a club match does, and understanding why requires understanding who already has a claim on the seats.
- Licence holdersClub Wembley seat licences carry an entitlement to England home matches, satisfied before any public sale.
- Supporters clubEngland Supporters Club members get access ahead of the general public, with priority tiered by matches attended.
- Sponsor and partnerCommercial partners and the FA's own allocations are drawn from the remainder.
- Away allocationThe visiting association receives its share under UEFA or FIFA competition rules.
- General saleWhatever is left, for the fixtures where anything is left at all.
The order in which claims on the stadium are satisfied. It describes the structure, not the number of seats in any category.
The middle tier of the stadium is the part that surprises people. Those seats were sold as long-term licences to help pay for the building, and the licence carries an entitlement to England home fixtures. Before a single ticket reaches the public, a significant slice of the ground is already spoken for. That is not a scandal — it is how the stadium was financed, and it was public at the time — but it explains why an England qualifier can be a sell-out and still feel like it has empty seats in the middle band, because a licence entitles the holder to a seat rather than obliging them to sit in it.
For everyone else, the route is membership. The FA runs a supporters' scheme, historically known as the England Supporters Travel Club, that gives members priority access and ranks that priority by the number of matches a member has attended. For high-demand fixtures a long attendance record is effectively the entry requirement, and for a low-demand friendly membership alone will usually do it. The mechanics, tiers and how caps are counted are set out in the guide to the England supporters travel club.
Resale is tightly controlled. Reselling a football ticket for a match in England without the organiser's authorisation is a criminal offence under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, a provision that applies to football and to no other sport, and Wembley enforces it. The FA operates its own official exchange for members. Anything else carries a genuine risk of a voided ticket at the turnstile.
The atmosphere argument
It comes up every single time, and both sides of it have a point.
The complaint is familiar: 90,000 people in a bowl with a running-track-sized gap of space between the front row and the touchline, a large proportion of the crowd attending occasionally rather than habitually, corporate seating through the middle of the ground, and a noise level that never sustains. Compared with a full St James' Park or the away end at a Championship ground on a Tuesday, Wembley for a routine qualifier can be flat.
The defence is that the ground is doing something a club stadium is not asked to do. A club crowd is largely the same people in the same seats every fortnight, with songs built over decades. An England crowd is assembled fresh for each fixture from across the country, with no shared repertoire beyond a handful of standards, and a substantial number of first-time attenders who have travelled a long way and are, reasonably, taking photographs rather than singing.
There is also a design point that gets less attention. Wembley's lower tier is set back from the pitch further than at most modern club grounds, because the bowl has to accommodate athletics-capable geometry and a very large safety zone. Sound rises and disperses rather than reflecting back down. No amount of atmosphere-generation will fully beat the acoustics of a 90,000-seat bowl with a partially open roof.
When it does work, it works on a scale nothing else in English football can match. A knockout tie under the lights with the roof lights on the arch and a full house is genuinely different, and anyone who was in the ground for a tournament semi-final will tell you the complaint about atmosphere is a complaint about routine fixtures rather than about the stadium.
Concerts, the NFL and the pitch question
Wembley is not a football stadium that occasionally does other things. It is a national events venue that plays a lot of football, and the FA's business model requires it to be.
The rugby league Challenge Cup final has been played there since 1929, which makes it one of the oldest continuous tenancies in British sport and considerably older than the FA's own regular use. American football arrived in 2007 with the first NFL regular-season game staged outside North America, and the fixture became an annual feature. Major boxing has used the ground for the biggest promotions available. Concerts fill the summer weeks between seasons.
Then there was the Tottenham Hotspur period. Between 2017 and 2019, while their own ground was built, Spurs played home league and European fixtures at Wembley, which put a full club season's worth of matches through a pitch that had already been criticised for its condition.
The pitch is the recurring cost of the model. It has been relaid repeatedly, several times within a single year in the stadium's early period, and the criticism from managers on both sides of England fixtures was blunt enough to be a genuine reputational problem. The current hybrid surface — natural grass reinforced with stitched synthetic fibres, a technology now standard at the top of the English game — holds up far better under heavy use than the original construction did. It has not eliminated the tension, because a concert stage on the playing surface in June is fundamentally at odds with a Nations League fixture in September, and something has to give.
England matches that made the ground
A short list, because the long one is unmanageable.
| Date | Match | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| 12 April 1924 | England 1-1 Scotland | The first international at the Empire Stadium |
| 25 November 1953 | England 3-6 Hungary | First home defeat by continental opposition, and the end of English complacency |
| 30 July 1966 | England 4-2 West Germany | The World Cup final, after extra time |
| 26 June 1996 | England 1-1 Germany | Euro 96 semi-final, lost on penalties at the old ground |
| 7 October 2000 | England 0-1 Germany | The last match at the old stadium |
| 1 June 2007 | England 1-1 Brazil | The first England match at the current stadium |
| 11 July 2021 | Italy 1-1 England | The Euro 2020 final, lost on penalties |
The 1953 Hungary match deserves more than a line. England had never lost at home to a side from outside the British Isles, and the assumption that English football was the world's best rested largely on that record. Hungary took it apart with a formation English defenders had not seen and did not know how to mark. The return fixture in Budapest the following May finished 7-1. English coaching spent the next decade absorbing the lesson, and the argument that the FA absorbed it too slowly is a fair one.
The 1996 semi-final is the other one everybody names. Southgate's penalty, the Wembley crowd, and a defeat that shaped the next twenty-five years of English football's relationship with the shoot-out — a relationship traced properly in England's penalty shoot-out history.
What to know before a first England home game
Get there early. Not thirty minutes early — properly early, with time to walk down Olympic Way rather than be carried down it, and time to clear a bag search that will be slower than you expect.
Travel light. The bag policy is small and strictly applied, there is nowhere to leave anything, and being turned away at the perimeter with a rucksack is the single most common way to miss a kick-off at Wembley.
Check what time the last train leaves from wherever you are going back to, and check it against the kick-off time rather than against ninety minutes of football, because extra time, a delayed start and a controlled exit from Wembley Park can add a long time to your evening. The queuing system out of the station is not optional and it is not fast.
Buy through the FA or through the official exchange. Not from a resale site, not from a man on Olympic Way, not from a listing that appears too easy for a fixture that is supposed to be sold out. The unauthorised resale of football tickets is a criminal offence in England and the stadium voids tickets it identifies as resold.
If your interest is in the building rather than a fixture, the ground runs tours on non-event days that take in the dressing rooms, the tunnel and the 107 steps to the Royal Box, and the Wembley Stadium visitor guide covers what those include. For a first live match, though, a full England fixture under the lights is the version worth waiting for — and if you want a sense of how the ground handles a domestic occasion first, the play-off final at Wembley is the closest thing English club football has to a national showpiece. The rest of the section sits at the England hub and the wider football pages.