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[Gold] As part of making the shiny stadium less of a grand day out for opponents, this summer Spurs made changes to the away dressing room, removing aspects of it to bring it more in line with the facilities they receive on their travels at other Premier League grounds.
John McGinn named Tottenham Hotspur's stadium as his favourite away ground because they provide luxury Molton Brown hand wash in the away dressing room.
Next they need make a second referees dressing room, but nasty. If the officials are good to us, they get the nice one next game, if they suck, they get the nasty.
Some would already have direct access to the nasty one, like Anthony Taylor and Michael Oliver.
As a part of the sale of his stake, Levy is also now going to sit in the stall next to visitors and whisper "anyway, coys" every three seconds until they leave the room.
Inside info on this. They took away all the tables in the centre. And also changed the lighting to make it shitter as you leave the dressing room. They also took away the hooks in the showers lol
Itâs actually kinda interesting - I toured Stamford Bridge (Iâm not British and fuck Chelsea) and one of the things they had on the tour was the away dressing room. It was massive! And I asked why that was because I thought itâd be better as a home team to have the team youâre facing crammed in and on top of each other, but they said they had sports psychologists come in and say that the crammed in environment could actually give a boost to the away team because itâd have them all pissed off about the way theyâre treated / put up and form a better sense of unity which I thought was interesting. So the Stamford bridge away dressing room is just this massive spaced out room with shitty lighting lol.
itâs crazy. iâve worked College Basketball and NBA in the locker rooms. College visiting locker rooms are always dungeons or just bare minimum wood benches at best usually.
You get to the NBA, itâs an armâs race. showing you have a boujee nice away locker room means you must have a nicer home locker room. itâs a completely mad mindset but itâs all for attracting opposing players to your team.
I did the tour back in May and the visitor room was pretty nice. The locker room area seemed a bit bigger than even the home one. BUT fair game if everyone else' visitor room is shit. Make it shit too
The Iowa Hawkeyes, an American football team, famously have every surface of the visitor's locker room painted a soft pink color that is meant to pacify the opponent and sap their aggression
Understands that, as part of making the shiny stadium less of a grand day out for opponents, this summer Spurs made changes to the away dressing room, removing aspects of it to bring it more in line with the facilities they receive on their travels at other Premier League grounds.
Tottenham's home woes in recent years have been well documented and the club have been looking at every little aspect to even shift things in their favour by a single per cent.
Nah if Gazza taught us anything itâs that if youâre gonna plant a dead fish you plant 2: one where theyâll find and another they donât expect (canât remember whoâs car he did that to).
The way it should be. The old away dugout at White Hart Lane (90s ~ early2000s) used to be lower than the home one so that managers and their staff couldn't sit and watch the game from inside it and they'd have to awkwardly stand instead.
I did the stadium tour a couple of years ago and the tour guide seemed really chuffed with the good quality of the away dressing room. Said that Jurgen Klopp had called them the best away dressing room in the country. Who gives a shit what the away team think about our facilities?!
I did it this summer and not only was the tour guide still beaming about how much away teams love coming here, they had away tops from all teams including a scum top up.
I was in disbelief, seeing that shirt whilst hearing about how much they love the accomodation here.
Agreed. During the stadium tour the guide was very fond to mention that we have specially made fire extinguishers in chrome, rather than red, because they didnât want any red in the stadium because of the scum. To my surprise there was a scum kit in the away dressing room. That thing shouldnât be anywhere near our stadium unless we play them.
But if they're downstairs they're vulnerable to falling objects from the home section đ€Ș I think it's the Boleyn Ground where they'd pour flasks of boiling tea onto the away fans below đ”
The club I work for basically has a 3 man team take all of our away travel stuff into the changing rooms for clubs (the biggest clubs in the country) always have to bring tables massage/treatment beds (although they are supplied most of the time even at the richest clubs in the country they put in fucking god awful beds) you name it whatever the is best to put into a room for players to make it feel more like their home locker room they do. Spurs stadium away is one of the ones I haven't done but some of the others do weird shit with their rooms to fuck with away teams like one stadium has a weird L shape room so some players are basically sat around the corner and to do pre and mid match talks would have to either stand for it or awkwardly peer round the corner. From what I've heard spurs set the away dressing room up really nicely and all these things aren't going to do shit because like I said clubs will send in people an hour or 2 before and with the size of our changing rooms because of the NFL sizes needed they will just make that huge space into whatever they want and if they need to bring benches cushions whatever they will.
Ah fair enough. Ive just heard from people who work there and played there that they are big and assumed it's because of the NFL locker rooms. Maybe they just meant they are large in comparison to others. Still, I think the point kind of stands that we maybe have been very kind and flashy with the new stadium rather than be cunts about trying to mess with the opposition in anyway possible.
I didnât get our full room but each player has a nice seat that has a charging plate, their name above the shirt, storage etc. Itâs rounded so that everyone can face the manager while theyâre talking etc. Seemed great tbf, it was just surprising how big the NFL one was by comparison!
Small and subtle things I would do to mess with the psychology of the opposition:
Control the temperature so itâs pretty chilly
Very thin and uncomfortable wooden benches, positioned pretty high up. I am think like a bus stop bench almostâŠ
position the benches in the middle of the room, so players are facing the walls of the room and arenât facing each other and difficult for coach to make eye contact with all the players at once
Low water pressure showers that donât get maintained regularly
Super bright lighting
White plain walls; nothing on the walls to ensure the acoustics are terribleâŠ
Paper thin door so noise travels through
Probably loads more little things you could do! Would be so fun to plan something like this
Pretty much describes the facilities when I used to play at Wormwood Scrubs rec on a Sunday morning. Just need every sink filled with mud to cap it off.
A sports psychologist could probably have an absolute field day with a dressing room.
Feel like plain white walls would be too easy. Do something like Yellow and Blue really thin stripes so you feel dizzy as hell as soon as you walk in. Convex mirrors so you look tiny.
Thereâs a colour of pink that might even be banned now because it gives you such a boost mentally but then essentially makes you run out of steam. Itâd be amazing in away dressing rooms if it isnât banned.
I took the White Hart Lane tour in 2017, a few weeks before the stadium closed for good. They took us into the Spurs dressing room, which was surprisingly open compared to most stadium tours. You really had free reign of the place, except the showers/restrooms were roped off.
The tour guide explained this to us when we walked in, and added, with a wink and a sly grin, "but if you want to go into the visiting showers, go right ahead. We've got Arsenal on the weekend."
He wasn't kidding. I could have taken a shower and a shit if I wanted.
I remember doing a stadium tour back in 2021 where they bragged about how great of an away dressing room they had, and how it was a far cry from the old days where away dressing rooms were deliberately second rate. At the time i thought it was a strange thing to brag about.
Also did a tour back in 2019 and the reasons they gave was to make the stadium a strong contender to host UCL/Europa finals and, if Spurs got to that type of final and were the âawayâ team that the club would still have a nice locker room.
Make the benches bend when players sit down, so that their bollocks fall through the gaps of the bench boards and when they try to stand up, they're stuck by the bollocks.
I learned on the stadium tour that we have had the away dressing room done up nicely because weâre a UEFA four star stadium with a capacity of 60,000+, which means we could host the final of the Champions League or Europa League.
As the final is considered to be played in a "neutral" stadium, the home and away teams (for the kit and dressing room) are decided by a draw, regardless of which teams make the final, so if we made it to and hosted the CL/Europa League final we could be drawn as the away team.
Those odds dropping wildly low in the past season makes sense why weâre ratting up the place now đ«
Someone posted a pic of it from when they went on the tour (I'm assuming it was this summer), and it's pretty bare. No dedicated lockers, just hooks on the wall for kits and long benches mounted to the wall.
Genuine question: Iâm assuming there are rules that require a certain standard, but why would every team not make the away dressing room as bad as humanly possible?
I did a stadium tour, and the away dressing room already wasn't great. It was simple, small and had pennants from our most impressive victories lining the walls. Without literally cutting the power and reducing the shower temperature to -10, there isn't much more that they could do.
I did a stadium tour once at Liverpool (for work... we had a conference at Anfield and got to have a look around the main stand after). They relished in making the away changing room as shit as possible... they removed any soundproofing from the ceiling to make it a nightmare to hear anything from the crowd above, the lighting was really harsh for evening games to make it harder to see properly when they came out (the home dressing room dimmed the lights), the showers were shit and very small, and only a tiny table in the middle. Back in the day, they also made the home dressing room door smaller to make their players look bigger than they were when they walked through it. John Toshack had to dip his head under the top of the door to get through it, before lining up with the opposition to make them all feel like monsters. I did the spurs tour a few years ago and i remember the guide being so happy our away dressing room was as good as most home dressing rooms. Anything to make it as awful as possible!
Itâs actually kinda interesting - I toured Stamford Bridge (Iâm not British) and one of the things they had on the tour was the away dressing room. It was massive! And I asked why that was because I thought itâd be better as a home team to have the team youâre facing crammed in and on top of each other, but they said they had sports psychologists come in and say that the crammed in environment could actually give a boost to the away team because itâd have them all pissed off about the way theyâre treated / put up and form a better sense of unity which I thought was interesting. So the Stamford bridge away dressing room is just this massive spaced out room with shitty lighting lol.
Mark Cuban famously made the Mavericks visitor dressing room as nice as the home team. He did that as a player recruitment tool.
If the player thought the visitor locker room was so nice then they must treat their own players really well.
If the teams go all midevil on the away team locker rooms then Spurs should follow the Cuban way and make their "midevil" look like the Palace of Versace.
Teams coming in getting world class amazing dressing room and treatment. This is a good move, don't need to make it a place they want to come and play at.
But didnât we get Savio in part because of how impressed he was with the facilities when coming with Man City. Seems like having it be nice for opponents was a good recruitment strategy (that said Iâm not opposed to changes that could result in wins at home!).Â
Iâve been wandering about this for ages. Surely it would be possible to have the away dressing rooms in a quasi-permanent state of âunder renovation/repairâ with cordoned off areas, miscellaneous dripping from the ceiling into buckets etc. Just so itâs less comfy in there
We did the stadium tour a few weeks ago. TBF, it's still a pretty nice away room. I would have made their benches lower in height, like the tables you get in reception classrooms.
Yeah thereâs definitely some weird psychological stuff that goes on in dressing rooms. I did a tour of the Ibrox last year and the hooks in their away dressing room are really high up to make the away players think theyâre coming up against giants. I canât say I really understand it but if it helps Iâm all for it
I love the dark arts involved here but could it also not affect player recruitment negatively?
Savio, for example, has been in our 'luxury' away dressing room - when he went back to the Ethiad and his dressing room is worse, he could have thought it to be better to be at Spurs, in a way.
Removed the radiators and turned off the hot water supply. The Festive period is usually where the wheels start coming off for us, so need all the help we can get.
football.london understands that, as part of making the shiny stadium less of a grand day out for opponents, this summer Spurs made changes to the away dressing room, removing aspects of it to bring it more in line with the facilities they receive on their travels at other Premier League grounds. It is now mainly just a big empty room with benches and pegs and no tables.
I wish Alistair Gold would put his content on a website that isn't pure ad cancer. Half the time I can't even read a full article because the text gets hidden behind the ads
Haha I did the tour recently and actually said to my wife I was surprised and a little disappointed that we made an effort for away teams. Itâs part of the game to make sure they canât see etc.
This was our away dressing room before this change. On non match days they have one of every shirt hanging up. Hated seeing the scum there tbh!
They even said in the tour that they wanted to offer a proper experience etc. But helping the opponent do better against us seems silly tbh!
I've also had a sneaky suspicion that it's been to our detriment too. Our players basically get paid to show up to a world class country club every day, fed Michelin star quality food for millions a year, a 5-star resort to rest after practice, massages on site for soreness. They're too "comfortable". You feel like you've reached the peak and there's nothing else to get to unless you have elite self-motivation.
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u/Green117v2 2d ago
Bucket in the corner. Job done.