London Stadium

London Stadium was built for a fixed date and then had to become something else. It opened on 5 May 2012 as the Olympic Stadium, staged the athletics for that summer's Games, and only afterwards went looking for a permanent purpose — the reverse order to most football grounds, which are built for a tenant first.

The conversion took three years. Between 2013 and 2016 the stadium was rebuilt around a cantilevered roof covering every seat, 21,000 retractable seats were installed, and the pitch level was lowered to bring the stands closer to the field — the kind of structural surgery a ground normally avoids once it has an occupant. West Ham United moved in for the 2016–17 season, contributing a fraction of the reconstruction cost against a public outlay running into the hundreds of millions of pounds, a financing split that has followed the club in local commentary ever since.

It has kept the athletics connection UK Athletics uses it for Diamond League meetings and it has hosted fixtures well outside football's usual range: the 2015 Rugby World Cup, England rugby league internationals, and MLB regular-season games between the Yankees and Red Sox in 2019 and 2024. Few Premier League venues rotate through that range of sports in a given year.

The stadium has carried three names in its short life, settling on London Stadium in 2016 after sponsorship talks with several companies came to nothing — it remains one of the larger English grounds without a naming-rights deal. Capacity for football has crept upward since the West Ham move, and the current 62,500 mark was set during the 2022–23 season, the biggest home crowd the club has drawn in its 127-year history.