What are the daily challenges involved in managing a successful stadium? Ahead of the 2013 Stadium Design and Development Russia & CIS Conference, the chairman of the ESSMA and Arsenal's Stadium and Facility Director John Beattie spoke to Construction IQ. He discusses safety, personel management and of course the problems encountered when moving into a new stadium.

1. Stadium Management Challenges at
Emirates Stadium
An Interview with John Beattie
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John Beattie
Stadium and Facility Director Arsenal and President at the
European Stadium and Safety Management Association
(ESSMA)
Arsenal and ESSMA
Gerald Clarke: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this IQPC podcast. I’m
Gerald Clarke, Editor for IQPC. Today I’m joined by John Beattie, Stadium and Facility
Director at Arsenal, and President of the European Stadium and Safety Management
Association, ESSMA. John, it’s a pleasure to have you here.
John Beattie: No problem. It’s good to join you.
Clarke: John, could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your role at
the Emirates Stadium, and at ESSMA?
Beattie: Yes, I’m John Beattie, and as you said, I’m the Stadium and Facilities
Director, primarily, at Arsenal Football Club, at the Emirates Stadium. I’ve been here
for an awful long time. I’m just into my 26th
year, so I’ve seen the whole changing
face of football. Certainly in Europe, and in the UK, in particular, going through all
the problems, the disaster at Hillsborough, and the Taylor Report, changing to all-
seat stadiums, and now Emirates Stadium.
Emirates Stadium, in some ways, is a lot easier to deal with than Highbury because of
the way we designed and built it, but the trouble is with the stadium, almost, it’s so
successful that it never stops. Having just finished this closed season, we were joking

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Emirates Stadium
An Interview with John Beattie
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that we don’t remember having one. In fact, this year there was hardly a break
between the end of last season and the beginning of this one. My remit here is I
look after, not only the safety and security side, but also the facilities side of the
stadium. Just to add to the remit, as if that isn’t enough, we look after all our
properties, so the London, Colney training ground, the youth academy, and then the
satellite shops that we have. It keeps us busy, to say the least. My department now
is 96 people. That shows you what’s involved in running a stadium of our size.
As far as ESSMA is concerned, I’ve been the president now for probably four or five
years, since it reinvented itself. It used to the European Stadium Managers
Association, ESMA. The president, Lionel Dreksler, unfortunately passed away a few
years ago. I took over the mantle from then, and we reinvented it a little bit to bring
in the safety part of the stadium management issue, because obviously that was
growing in importance. In those early days we used to have 30 or 40 members, and
we’ve now been growing over the last few years.
We are now into 300 or 400 members, with lots of corporate companies involved as
well. So we can put people in touch with the relevant suppliers, but the main thing is
that the stadium managers have got a way of finding out from their peers how to
deal with problems. We’ve also recently incorporated the head groundsman into
that, because part of stadium management is the grass bit in the middle, and in this
way the professionals can actually find out what is the best way of dealing with
things. The whole ethos of the association is to promulgate best practice across
Europe and, to some extent, across the world. We don’t limit ourselves to Europe, if
places further afield ask for our help.
Clarke: What are the biggest day-to-day challenges in stadium management?
Beattie: Opening the doors! If we didn’t have to open the doors and let the
public in, it would be so much easier. To be fair, most of the day-to-day challenges
are really more about the preplanning, particularly with events. Without being
funny, it is the public that cause the biggest day-to-day challenge, because they are
unpredictable. You can plan as much as you like, but you only need to get a few fans
doing what you don’t expect them to do, or a few fans behaving antisocially, and it
can change the whole dynamic of an event. As far as running facilities is concerned,
and planning for the events, that’s all done weeks if not months in advance so that,
hopefully, you don’t get those surprises on the match day.
Clarke: Stadiums include huge operations and that requires personnel, and what are
the issues regarding training and maintaining the venue staff?

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Beattie: We have two different types of staff here. As I mentioned earlier, we
have 96 full-time members of staff, who range from security guards and general
porters through to management staff. I have my stadium manager, his assistant, and
my event and security manager, event safety and security manager, and her
assistant. They have their own little, mini departments under myself that deal with
both sides of the business we deal with. As far as maintaining the full-time staff,
that’s not an issue. Everybody comes and stays. As a team, the vast majority of us
have worked together for 12, 13 years plus, and that means that we all know each
other, and dovetail very easily because we all know how each other works. We are
very fortunate in that environment, and I think it’s possibly because of the
environment we work in that that happens. Because you’re working to almost
biweekly time cycles between events, everything stacks up and there’s not time to
really get bored with what you’re doing. There’s almost just not enough time.
Moving on to the venue staff, it’s a little bit more difficult with the venue staff for
events. A lot of companies use agency staff to deal with all their stewarding, and
things like that, whereas we don’t. We have a casual worker pool of about 850
stewards, who all work on casual worker agreements. All those are directly trained
by us, and paid by ourselves, so we have greater control of the calibre of staff that
we have at the venue, and that’s important. Obviously, the stewards are the people
that the supporters see firsthand. We can run it as great as we like from the control
room, but they don’t see us. It’s important that your staff on the ground are the
people that are well represented, know what’s expected, get the club ethics, vision
and values out there, and therefore can put across the Arsenal brand properly.
Clarke: Emirates Stadium is now seven years old, but the change must be still fresh in
your mind. What were the problems that you encountered when moving to occupy
the new stadium?
Beattie: The biggest one problem was that everybody thought they were more
important than anyone else. I would not have to work any more if I’d got ₤1 for
every time someone said, but we didn’t do it like that at Highbury. It was a problem!
Obviously, as much as it was well planned, well thought through [?] and we moved in
on time, the problem was that we literally only got two weeks lead-in time to learn
the whole building and get everything in place, from when the builders gave us the
keys to our first major event, and that was a fraught couple of weeks. When we
added it up afterwards, my office staff did five weeks work in that two-week period.
People that had done the process before told me, you won’t be ready, whatever you
think you won’t be ready. I didn’t believe them, but now I would tell anyone opening
a stadium that they won’t be ready, unless they have six months lead in time, from
the builders giving them the keys to running their first event.

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Emirates Stadium
An Interview with John Beattie
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The problem was, with all the members of staff, other departments didn’t really
understand all the issues, because they looked at it as their own little micro climate.
It took a few explanations, shall we say. We had to turn round quite forcibly to other
departments and say, yes, we appreciate you had a small problem with keys, or that
someone got into an area they shouldn’t have, but we have to deal with your
problems, we have to deal with their problems, and these problems, these problems,
these problems, and these problems. And suddenly, after about three or four weeks
people started to realise there was a much bigger picture than whether somebody
got a sandwich to eat that they shouldn’t have, and that’s when we started moving
forward, but it needed those discussions to be able to move forward to do that.
Clarke: Safety is obviously paramount during events, and what are the considerations
there must be to ensure the safety of event goers during the design of a stadium or
venue?
Beattie: Again that all comes down to preplanning. Not only in the design, I
mean it’s important that the stadium operator, the person who is going to be
responsible for running that stadium is involved almost from concept design stage.
Far too often, stadium owners, clubs or local authorities that are building stadiums
think that the operator will magically be able to operate it once they’ve built it. You
can save so much money in running costs, and in actual building costs, if you involve
that operator from day one because they know how they want it to run, and it’s
easier to change things. It’s a lot cheaper to change a line on a drawing than once
it’s built and it’s a physical structure, so in the design you’ve got to get the operator
involved early.
As far as planning for the events, everything needs to be done in advance. You’ve
got to make sure you’ve got contingency plans. You’ve got to make sure the
contingency plans are actually able to be put into practice with the number of staff
that you have. You need a detailed control room, you need a chain of command. All
those structures and all that training of the stewards need to be done months in
advance, so when you do open the doors you’re confident you’ve got everything in
place, almost so the event should be able to run itself.
Clarke: So what does gearing up for a match day involve?
Beattie: Well, we really start gearing up for each match day about three to
four days in advance. On the stewarding side, all the personnel are placed on the
stewarding tree on the software, so that we know we are fully staffed, and that takes
into account those that aren’t available for certain events. If we have any
deficiencies, we’ve then got time to actually plan how we can move people around.
Hopefully, we rarely have deficiencies, because the number we have takes into

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Emirates Stadium
An Interview with John Beattie
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account those that won’t be available. As I said, we have about 850 on our books.
We need about 600 to 675 to open the doors, so the extra is the normal amount of
natural unavailability, plus about 10% on top of that, to make sure that we’re not
going to be short at any stage.
So on that side, your stewarding side is all taken into account in getting that ready.
On the facilities side, we do a whole number of pre-match checks that range from
making sure the stadium is clean, through to all the electrics, and everything else
that is tested, and that’s run in that 48 hours before the event. My management
staff will do an inspection of the stadium, in its entirety, 48 hours before the event.
We then issue worksheets from that, as to what’s been found in deficiencies in the
stadium, and then we do that again on the morning of the event, so again everything
is checked. Those checklists are handed out, not only to the people we expect to put
it right, but to the steward supervisors of the areas where we’ve found problems, so
again another check is made that all the work has been carried out before we open
the doors.
As we lead up to opening the doors, all the supervisors will get briefed. My
management team will have put a briefing in place the day before the game, or if it’s
an evening game on the morning of the game. I then brief that to my seniors, the
CEO, and people like that, and my event safety and security manager will brief the
steward supervisors, and they then brief their squads. We use a pyramidal briefing,
so that everybody gets to know what’s going on, but you’re not doing a briefing to
600 people, which obviously would not be practical to do. Once that’s done, and all
the checks are done, the stewards then call in that their area is fully manned and
ready to open, and there are no other problems within their area. They call that
back into the control room, and once we’ve had those checks from everyone we
then give the order to open, everybody goes in, and hopefully we have a nice, safe
event.
Clarke: What do you consider to be a successful match day?
Beattie: If everybody goes home in the same condition they arrived in! We
can’t guarantee to improve their condition, which sometimes is necessary, but in a
successful match day it’s that everybody comes, has a great time, and goes home at
the end of the day.
Clarke: So how can stadium management ensure success for their events?
Beattie: By planning properly. As I said before, everything is about having
those plans and processes in place, and being prepared. Surprises are something
that should not happen on an event day, and if you plan properly and effectively

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then you shouldn’t get the surprise, or if you do you’ve got something in place to
deal with it. That’s what’s critical.
Clarke: Thank you, John, for sharing your insights and your time with us today.
Beattie: No problem.
Clarke: We look forward to hearing more from you at the stadiums event.
Beattie: I’m looking forward to it.
Clarke: If you would like to find out more about this topic, and the Stadium Design
and Development Russia & CIS event, this October 28th
to 30th
in Kiev, Ukraine, visit
us at www.stadiumdevelopmentrussia.com
Please note that we do all we can to ensure accuracy within the translation to word of audio interviews but that
errors may still understandably occur in some cases. If you believe that a serious inaccuracy has been made within
the text, please contact +44 (0) 207 368 9482 or email gerald.clarke@iqpc.co.uk