We had an team away day today for work and the venue was a room in the conference facilities at Wembley Stadium. The bad in my title to this blog entry in this case actually wasn’t that bad – we did some planning for our team at work, had some good chow (though the lady who was in charge of the food was an absolutely dragon lady – I still can’t believe our package didn’t even include water throughout the day) and had some money laundering training. All in all a relatively easy day at work.

The highlight was a quickie tour of Wembley Stadium – the field of which we’d been distracted by all day. Since the Madonna concert (when the field apparently got pretty cut up) they have been working on the grass non-stop. The glow of the warming lights was absolutely surreal but the grass looked great.

The official tour of the stadium is apparently about 90 minutes but I reckon in our 45 minutes or so on tour we probably covered most of what you get on the official tour including going into the changing rooms, seeing player warm-up area, going up to the VIP reception area, passing by the royal box, and getting a photo of the cup (100% replica.) Because of the grass growing we couldn’t actually step out on to the grass but we got pretty close.

The most interesting part of the tour (apart from finding out that the VIP seats were worth £80!) were all the stats thrown out at us by our really enthusiastic and really funny guide including:

Seating	90,000
Tiers	3 Tiers: Lower: 34,303; Middle: 16,532; Upper: 39,165. To put this in perspective the Lower Tier has the same capacity as Riverside Stadium (home to Middlesborough) and the Upper Tier can seat more people than White Hart Lane (home to the Tottenham Hotspurs.)
The Arch	1,750 tonnes (designed “The Gherkin” architect Baron Norman Foster) – its the same height as the London Eye and you can see it clearly across all of London including from the London Eye
Toilets	2,618 (the most appreciated aspect of the stadium!) including urinals

It was all pretty stunning to hear. With all that Wembley Stadium is still not the biggest in the world. There is one in North Korea that can seat 150,000. Man I complained about the nosebleed section of Wembley at the Madonna concert – can’t imagine what it would be like in the nosebleed section of the North Korean stadium!

In the changing rooms	Beckham’s number	Grass is growing – a closer look

£80,000 seats	Work crew gazing around in wonder	The Cup – worth £200K?

Here’s video footage of our walk through “the tunnel”. Probably the only time I’ll ever do that in my lifetime!