Q’s With Wembley Stadium GM Liam Boylan: ‘We Know What Promoters Want’

– Wembley Stadium
While there’s no naming rights sponsor, mobile operator EE is the venue’s headline sponsor

Wembley Stadium has been stepping up its live event game over the past years, which resulted in a record season 2018/2019 in terms of events hosted at the iconic venue. Pollstar had an extensive chat with Wembley Stadium’s General Manager Liam Boylan about what it takes to run a 90,000 capacity building in a time of unprecedented demand for live entertainment.

We’ve got an events team, for which there’d be nothing worse if they were just stuck with the same events going on all the time. The great thing about Wembley is its availability for multi-purpose events. We need to maximize that aspect. [Soccer] is always going to be there but people are asking for more.

When the customer comes in, it isn’t just about turning up for the event and leaving after. It’s about how they’re looked after from the moment they approach the stadium, including the pre-match entertainment.

Even before [soccer] matches you’re starting to see lighting, laser and video display. They’ve taken on board what the music industry has been doing for years. People are really enjoying live entertainment, and there’s a bar that’s been set, and people are looking for that. And if you’re not pushing your own bar, they won’t come.

Now, Wembley has a name, it’s known throughout the world, artists want to play here. But if we’re not on the ball with everything, that’ll change.

One of the biggest changes in the last three years has been security, because of the atrocities that happened elsewhere.

Artists are nervous about it. They’re now looking at whether they and their fans are safe playing a certain venue. You have to enhance the security, but you need to be very careful about how you do it. You don’t want a customer feeling that they’re entering a prison.

We have an ethos here that can be summed up as the three Ss: safety, security and service. The three have to go together. 

A customer coming in now is looking at, ‘what are you doing to make me feel safe?’ And if they, for instance, feel like they didn’t go through a search regime, they start to ask why, because they feel if you’re not doing it to them, you’re not doing it elsewhere.

One of the things we introduced is the restricted bag policy. When you first mention this, people push back. ‘I’m coming from work, I got my laptop bag, why are you making me stop doing that?’ But whenever we’ve explained our reasons and rational to fan groups, they’re on board straight away. 

America is two years ahead of us with that, their venues have been doing restricted bag policies for a while, and they’ve changed the culture. We’ve got to do that now in the UK. If you’re going to an event, take your bare necessities. 

It’s costly. The security budgets are now a big thing for me to sit down with my finance people and it obviously pushes the costs on top of what we’re already doing by about half a million pounds a year. But it is an absolute necessity

But you’re still coming to be entertained, to go away with inspiring memories – so I want security to be there, but I want my frontline to realize that guest service is also important. When [my security staff] are dealing with the customer, they are first and foremost stewards, they are there to enhance the customer’s day.

– Ed Sheeran
On one of his four sold-out nights at Wembley Stadium last summer

You’ve got to move away from a hole in the wall that’s serving you one type of draught beer. While this is a Budweiser house, they offer their full range. There’s a Camden bar offering the craft beers.

We’ve now got two pubs, the Lioness and the Three Lions. People are looking for that food experience and selection. They know it’s a big stadium, they know it holds 90,000, but they want to feel like they’re walking into a gastro pub like you’d find on any regular high street.

Obviously, ticketing is evolving very quickly. The standard ticketing process of ordering a hard ticket and having it delivered in the post is still there, people still like a souvenir, especially if it’s for something like an FA Cup final.

Other people are now looking for electronic tickets. We’re now with Apple, so you can use the Apple Wallet. It’s about exploring new technologies and educating the public on it.

Now, for the Emirates FA Cup final, you can choose between print-at-home, electronic tickets on your phone or a hard ticket.

Because we don’t have a home club, there are new customers coming in all the time. So you’re constantly educating customers about how to get into the venue quickest. 

Whether it’s a concert in the round, whether it’s an NFL game, it’s an amazing feeling, for the customer and the staff who work here. The staff buy into it, and you get the same staff coming back all the time. They work hard, they really do, but they’re in an environment where people are enjoying themselves, and there’s nothing better. To be around people who are having a brilliant time, it rubs off on you all the time.

– Adele
Enjoying the home field advantage at Wembley Stadium

We’re looking at a crowd safety app at the moment, one for our team on the ground initially. We have 1,500 stewards, and another 2,500 to 3,000 food and beverage people. So, on an event day, we ramp up to around 5,000 event-day staff. When you’re doing briefing notes for all those people, that’s a lot of paper. Environmentally you don’t want to be producing that much paper.

What is more, your briefing document is usually ready two days prior to an event, but what if something changes? You’re then relying on word of mouth and your staff listening and taking notes. The app will have a briefing document, which is live.

It will also help our transient staff, who may not know about the exact location of each food stall, to point customers in the right direction.

That technology will then, slowly but surely, be rolled out to the customer. Any customer app will have to support what I call sofa-to-sofa experience. I can buy my ticket on there, I can plan my journey, and find my way around the venue. I think, eventually, we’ll move on to a point where your ticket becomes live only once you’re getting close to the venue, to stop the selling-on of tickets. 

The technological side of it is by no means finished, it’s always going to grow, but for venue operators it’s about understanding how it can benefit them. If you can move people where you want them to move, rather than where they think they should move, that’s huge, because you’re stopping the cross-flow of people on concourses.

– Taylor Swift at Wembley
Performing at a London icon

It’s called Crowdsafe. They’re developing the app with us. We looked at a few that are currently used in other stadiums, but they were more for a [soccer] stadium with an in-house crowd who all knew what they were doing.

Finding one that is dealing with this transient crowd all the time was difficult, we demand a lot more of it. The Crowdsafe app is made by a company called Approved Technology, who have been really good at coming to our venue and shadowing our team for  a number of events to understand it. They haven’t tried to deliver this off the shelf. They came in to understand the nuts and bolts of our business.

Yes it is. We have a group called FAST, which is the FA Sustainability Team. They’re now, I’ll be honest, in our faces all the time, just pushing us on what we’re doing on single-use plastics, on straws etc. We no longer have plastic straws inside the venue. Budweiser can produce aluminum bottles rather than plastic. There’s difficulty to that, because of licensing hard aluminum bottles for [soccer] matches, but we’re looking into decanting it in certain areas.

Nothing of our waste goes to landfill, which for a stadium of this size is huge. We have targets to help increase our recycled waste and our general waste is turned into power to hear 48,000 local homes. 

FAST is very active. The world demands it now. It’s part of the customer service to show that you understand the environment and the impact you’re having on it. With 90,000 people coming here, you’ve got a lot of waste so it’s important that we handle it responsibly. We’re in a very good place, we’re by no means there yet, but we’re pushing in the right direction.

– Wembley crowd
Enjoying Ed Sheeran on stage

No, you really can’t. You see the likes of Tottenham’s new stadium, it’s absolutely state of the art, amazing. We’re 12 years old now, so you’re constantly looking at what needs to change.

We, for instance, changed the lights to LED, for environmental reasons, but also because you cannot just turn sodium lights off and on again, meaning you couldn’t use them in any kind of pre-event entertainment, whereas a LED light just flicks back on.

It’s simple things too: what types of bins are you using, which are the stewarding companies you’re using, what are their training methods, what’s going inside the boxes, what about the TVs in there, because obviously TVs have moved to 4K and 5K, who knows where you’re going to be at. The network system, we’re 4G, it’s great, but Barcelona are now 5G, why are we not 5G? You’re constantly looking at that upgrade side of it.

We’re going to invest another couple of million pounds to upgrade the whole sound system. The thing with Wembley is, we are owned by the Football Association, who are a non-profit organization. All of their profit is reinvested directly back into grassroots [soccer], so they’re always looking at, ‘how do I put a 3G [soccer] pitch into a small town that needs it?’

So if I’m going to them to say I want a new sound system, I’ve got to justify why it makes sense for this venue. 

They bring in the main PA, and what they do now is something called a ring delay: they hang speakers from the roof, pointing down into the upper levels, because a delay tower can only hit so much. So rather than relying on the front of stage and delays blasting up there, why don’t we install such a ring delay system permanently. 

If we install it permanently, we’re in a position where a promoter can come in and just plug into it. The cost per event was something like £40,000 to put that ring delay in. If we invest in it, we benefit from it long-term, but we also help our client, who wants to come in and use a system they like and trust.

– Security is of utmost importance at Wembley Stadium
With no soccer team using Wembley Stadium as a permanent home stadium, there

It’ll go in next winter. We usually plan a lot of housekeeping work in our quiet winter period between November and February. We were going to replace the floodlights too.

That’s been pushed to the next winter period following Tottenham’s tenancy extension, but come 2020, in time for the EURO, we’ll have that in place.

With the current demand for live events, it seems like there has never been a better time to be working in live entertainment, would you agree?

It’s exactly that. Who would have ever thought that esports would get as big as it is? Why would you buy a ticket to watch somebody playing a game on a big screen? But it’s great entertainment, people love the atmosphere. You’re now seeing bespoke arenas being built for this, it’s not against any imagination that it’ll soon be in stadiums.

No one knows how big hologram concerts could become. The entertainment industry is always evolving, because they realize that people want to escape. People want to be entertained, they always have. What venues can do, and what promoters and event owners can deliver, is huge. 

Even in the sporting world, look at the opening ceremony of the UEFA Champions League final, it’s moved towards that Super Bowl sort of feel. 

When you get it right, it’s amazing. Whether it’s a concert in the round, whether it’s an NFL game, it’s an amazing feeling, for the customer and the staff who work here. The staff buy into it, and you get the same staff coming back all the time. They work hard, they really do, but they’re in an environment where people are enjoying themselves, and there’s nothing better. To be around people who are having a brilliant time, it rubs off on you all the time.

It’s huge. We’ve got a completely separate team who run all of that side. It’s incredibly important for us, it’s great revenue. People think we may be doing 35 to 40 events in a normal year, but we’re not. We’re never asleep because of conferences and banqueting. We have some huge clients that come in here, whether it’s for their annual conference or one-off events or a Christmas party.

– Wembley Stadium
The surrounding areas have seen massive developments come up over the past years, attracting a new audience to the venue

Right now, the team that we have set up delivers. So, I have a feeling that even if a facilities manager came in, or if the recent bid for the stadium had been successful, it wouldn’t have changed the team in operations, because they are at the top of their game, they’ve been handpicked over years now. There is a desire to work here, which is great for us. If we put a job advert out for the position of event manager, we’ll get anything between 800 to 2,000 applicants. You’re also able to headhunt.

I totally understand what’s going on outside, and it’s interesting to us. What it boils down to is that this is a multi-purpose venue, effectively a large arena without a roof, and it could fall under that umbrella quite quickly. If you think about the type of events that come in, the conversion between events, we are similar to the O2. 

Coming up to the concert period, we will have the Championship Playoffs here on the Monday, May 27. Kick-off is at three o’clock, if it goes to penalties it finishes around 7 p.m. The next morning BTS want to load in. So, Henry [Munro, senior event technical manager], has to take out all the seats in the pocket, where the stage will go, put a pitch cover down, so the trucks can all drive onto the pitch, so they can all start their process of building the stage to be ready for their event on the Saturday, and allow for enough time to put production days in. They can’t do that if we’re not a good, multi-purpose venue. That’s facilities management.

It allowed us to build the right team, which has become a unique selling point. Because I worked in that industry for 14 years, I know what promoters want. Promoters and their production are moving from town to town, and everything’s different. They want to know that somebody understands their needs before they come in, like providing access for their trucks, somebody that can start to prep some of the things to make it a little bit easier, things that they can plug and play into.

Only two, three years ago, we would have said, that when the Championship Playoff finished at 7 o’clock on a Monday evening, you couldn’t come in until 24 hours later. Now you can come in the next morning. 12 hours is huge to promoters, that’s a full shift of building a stage. If you’re suddenly able to give them one full shift back, they can stay ahead of time. 

We’re about to upgrade our kitchens downstairs. In the past, they had to come in with temporary kitchens, PKL units, kind of like festivals, and park in our broadcast compound. Not the best environment. So, we went to one of the chief tour caterers, Eat Your Heart Out. We’re now going to put a whole new system in, plug and play for modular kitchens. 

We’ve started to go to the promoters and say, ‘what can we do to make it better for you.’ And that’s what we’ve done with the help of our key personnel. We’ve turned around Wembley’s appeal. Wembley had an appeal from a selling standpoint for promoters. But the production teams would find it difficult because of some of the challenges they faced. We need to get every single level of an event owner wanting to come here and wanting that experience. 

We’re very close to it. I’m delighted with the team that work with me now, who understand it. They’re going out to see BTS in the States to understand all of the layers that show is demanding. They’re arranging meetings with promoters. 

Once you start talking to these people and understand what their working life is, you then can adapt your side to it. Once you do that, they feel an understanding. If any event owner feels that you understand their world, that’s a huge difference to them.

At the end of every year I would say to the promoters that came here: tell me the three things that I do that really annoy you. And I’d go to fix those three things. That’s what I do each time.

Don’t try and pretend that you’ve got it right, and don’t give yourself a slap on the back at the end of a brilliant event. You need to ask those ugly questions, what am I doing that annoys you, and correct it. 

Once you start to do that, they get that you understand it on a base level, and once you understand it on a base level, you deliver an amazing event.