'I love you Sunderland!': How pop music - including Taylor Swift - took over football grounds (2024)

Wembley: home to the big one this summer. Thousands descending on the stadium for the event of 2024. A career pinnacle for many of those involved, the stands full and tickets going for thousands.

Also, the Champions League final was held there a few weeks ago.

Wembley may be England’s national stadium, and the self-styled ‘home of football’, but for many others it is most famous as a music venue — and, therefore, the natural choice for the extraordinary phenomenon of Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras’ tour when picking a venue for next week’s concerts in London.

Swift is not alone. Wembley will also host Bruce Springsteen, Green Day and AC/DC this summer, just some of 14 concerts taking place there in 2024 — more than the scheduled number of football games.

Plenty of other football grounds will get in on the act, too. Tonight, Swift plays the first gig of the English leg of her tour at Anfield, the home of Liverpool and, for many, just as iconic a venue as Wembley.

Later this summer, Pink, Pearl Jam and Travis Scott all have shows at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Foo Fighters and Burna Boy will take to the stage at the London Stadium in June. Take That played at the City Ground in Nottingham in May, while the Emirates, Old Trafford, St James’ Park and Villa Park have been regular destinations for big artists in the past.

It’s no wonder that the venues are so keen to welcome the world’s biggest musical acts. Depending on the configuration of the stage, you can usually get a few more people in for a concert than a match, tickets might well be more expensive and people can drink for much longer — all good news for the bottom line.

Tottenham hosted a five-night run of Beyonce concerts in 2023, which they say brought in £5million ($6.4m) profit, just from food and drink and a cut of the merchandise sales. In an era when expensive modern stadiums have to be paid for, these events are baked into the business plan.

But what of the artists? Why might musicians want to play in a venue which is, in theory, built for sport rather than concerts?

Most people will tell you that the Beatles started the phenomenon of pop concerts being played at sports grounds. This is sort of true, but it depends on what you define as a stadium: Elvis Presley, for example, played concerts as early as 1956 at venues also used for basketball and ice hockey, but these were indoor arenas with a more limited capacity.

If we are to define a stadium as a large outdoor arena primarily used for sport, then the Beatles were indeed the first, when they first played at Shea Stadium, the former home of the New York Mets, in 1965. It was an innovation that stemmed from necessity: they were so popular that no indoor venue was big enough, so Shea Stadium it was, even though the sound was terrible and they played on a stage 100 yards away from the actual crowd, most of whom were screaming so loudly that nobody — not least the band — could hear the music.

A few years later, the Festival for Peace was held at Shea, featuring Janis Joplin, Miles Davis, Paul Simon and others. After that, huge sports stadiums became a status symbol for big artists: Springsteen, The Who, Elton John, The Rolling Stones and The Police all played at Shea.

Billy Joel played the last shows there in 2008, joined for one last song by Paul McCartney, before it was demolished to make way for the New York Mets’ new home, Citi Field, which has continued the legacy. McCartney played the first show there in 2009, and this year, Blink-182 and Def Leppard will follow in his footsteps.

These things are always slightly tricky to pin down, but the first pop concert to be held at a football stadium in the UK is thought to be an Oxfam charity show in 1969 at Wembley, featuring Status Quo, Yes and Love Affair. From then, the national stadium became a regular stop for the world’s biggest acts as they passed through the UK, including Michael Jackson (15 times, no less), Madonna, Wham! and Queen, the latter having been one of the star acts at Live Aid in 1985. When Freddie Mercury died in 1991, Wembley was the natural place for his tribute concert.

The main reason an artist might choose a stadium over a more purpose-built arena is relatively simple: scale. The biggest indoor arena in the UK is the newly-opened Co-op Live arena in Manchester, which holds around 23,500 people. You can get twice that into even a relatively modest football ground, which is good news in terms of kudos and revenue for the artist — not just because there are more people, but it’s clearly much more efficient to play to 50,000 people in one night rather than 12,000 over four.

Plus, there’s greater scope for bigger and more elaborate sets. Try getting U2’s stage from their ‘360 Degree’ tour in 2009, which cost a reported $31million and featured a giant four-legged structure they called ‘The Claw’, into a standard arena.

The presence of at least one 40,000-plus capacity stadium within a couple of hours’ drive of most people in the UK also affords artists to play places they might otherwise not have been able to. Beyonce played at the Stadium of Light in 2023, leading to the slightly unexpected sight of the biggest pop star of the last 20 years striding onto the stage and bellowing: “SUNDERLAND. WELCOME. I LOVE YOU.”

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There’s also a sense that playing at a football stadium is just a little more special for bands. For a start, because you can actually tell where you are, as opposed to doing your thing in one of many glorified aircraft hangers.

“When you do an arena, it’s one date in a string of arenas,” says Ricky Wilson, singer from the Leeds band The Kaiser Chiefs. “You wake up under them on a tour bus, and you could be anywhere. Stadiums are different.”

It’s not all emotion and glamour. The Kaiser Chiefs have played a couple of shows at Elland Road, home of Leeds United, which Wilson remembers fondly but recalls one or two drawbacks.

“If you’re in U2, they probably arrive last minute, come off stage, someone puts a dressing gown on them and they get into a car and are whisked away. But when you play your hometown stadium, there’s a lot of people calling up and saying, ‘I’m at Gate B, talking to a man with a moustache and he doesn’t know where I’m supposed to be going’. I don’t think Bono has to go through that.”

“But you are quite important for a day, which is nice. Usually, when you go to a football stadium you really aren’t important. It’s really nice when someone on security doesn’t know who you are, just for that moment where you can point at the poster and go: ‘I’m the one in the middle’.”

There are challenges when it comes to converting football grounds to concert venues.

“It can vary, depending on the scale of the football match taking place prior, but typically, 12-15 hours after the final whistle, we can have concert trucks driving onto the pitch ready to start erecting the stage,” says Ross McMeekin, senior events manager at Wembley Stadium.

“Once the pitch is clear we will begin to lay the concert floor and start the removal of the stadium stage pocket (the area of the lower tier on the west side of the stadium) to provide space for the stage to sit in.

“A lot of the work is usually done through the night. You could leave the stadium at 6pm after a football game and by the time you come back in the morning it will be concert-ready. It’s incredible how quickly it can be turned around.”

Most concerts at football stadiums tend to be held in the summer, for favourable weather conditions, but mainly to avoid too much of a clash with actual football games. In July 2017, U2 played at the Amsterdam Arena just two days before Ajax hosted a Champions League qualifying game against Nice, severely curtailing the time the club had to transform its home ground. Carve yourself out four minutes to watch this clip: it’s strangely hypnotic and fascinating.

Slightly surprisingly, McKeekin says that football games tend to be a bigger logistical challenge than concerts, largely because a touring act will generally arrive with a very well-drilled team that will sweep in and install the sets. From there, getting people in and out of the venue tends to be relatively straightforward.

A football match involves a wide range of ‘stakeholders’ who all want a hand in how the occasion is run — teams, organising bodies, local football associations, councils, government, police and broadcasters. Years of planning went into Wembley’s Champions League final, and while a big concert isn’t exactly a last-minute job, it tends to be much more ‘plug and play’.

There have been occasions when things haven’t gone so smoothly, though. In 2009, Fabio Capello, then England’s manager, was reportedly upset about the damage that a Coldplay show had done to the Wembley turf. This year, fans of the K-pop band Seventeen were blamed for ruining the surface of the Macau Olympic Sports Centre Stadium.

Some slightly more implausible rows were caused at Tynecastle, the home of Scottish Premiership side Hearts, after their pitch was apparently “destroyed” by the marauding fans of… the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.

A gig held at Huddersfield Town’s Kirklees Stadium in 2018 caused one of football’s more unlikely beefs: David Wagner vs Little Mix. Huddersfield’s manager at the time said that someone had “obviously made a big, big mistake” when a show by the pop quartet had apparently made a dreadful mess of one end of the ground. “This is not satisfactory and not what I expect when we play in the best and biggest competition in the world,” said a livid Wagner.

These days, at regular concert venues like Wembley, possible issues are mitigated by having a ‘concert season’ (when sports events take a back seat) and improvements in pitch technology that make it much easier to fix the damage done by a concert.

“Once concert season has come to an end, the old pitch is dug up and replaced,” says Paul Smyth, Wembley Stadium general manager. “Wembley now operates a ‘lay and play’ pitch system, which allows us to grow new pitches at a turf farm away from the stadium.

“Lay and play is a game-changer for a multi-purpose venue like Wembley Stadium. Previously, we grew the pitch from seed. In the summer months, it takes up to five weeks after a concert to get a pitch ready for a football fixture. Now it can be done in a week. It has allowed us to open up new dates and extend our traditional concert season significantly.”

Away from commercial considerations, there are still kudos for artists playing in renowned stadiums, particularly when they have a bond with the venue.

One of Oasis’ defining gigs at the height of their mid-1990s fame was at Maine Road, then home of Manchester City, the team the Gallagher brothers support. Newcastle United fan Sam Fender’s show at St James’s Park in the summer of 2023 looked like a quasi-religious experience.

When Take That played at Anfield in 2019, they brought Jerry Marsden onto the stage to sing You’ll Never Walk Alone — a shrewd way for lads from Manchester to ingratiate themselves with the locals.

Going back down the years brings another, slightly curious footballing connection to the music world. The Who played a famous concert at Charlton Athletic’s The Valley in 1974, which was partly arranged by their manager, Bill Curbishley, and helped out by his brother… Alan Curbishley, future club legend.

Sometimes there can be some slightly more unusual instances. It’s not technically a concert but a 1994 edition of Songs Of Praise (for the uninitiated: a long-running British TV show aired on Sunday nights, consisting of mainly Christian hymns and music, usually filmed in a church) was recorded at Old Trafford. The mosh pit must have been absolutely out of control.

On rare occasions, concerts have effectively taken priority over the host team. In July 2008, Manchester City had to play a UEFA Cup qualifying tie against Faroe Islands outfit EB Streymur at Barnsley’s Oakwell because their pitch wasn’t ready following concerts by Foo Fighters and Bon Jovi. That was Mark Hughes’s first official ‘home’ game as manager and a few weeks before Sheikh Mansour bought the club.

The idea of a concert even being on the same level of priority as a football match can be enough to rile the game’s more traditional gatekeepers. But when Taylor Swift steps onto the Anfield stage tonight, she will be just as at home there as Mohamed Salah.

(Top photo: Gareth Cattermole/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management)