‘No cheese room’: Everton stadium designer lands cheeky swipe at Spurs as more plans unveiled

The new Everton Stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock won't be a "super frilly building" as the lead designer lands a subtle dig at the extravagance of the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.

Stadium Concept Design Guardian Dan Meis reiterated that whilst the new ground will be state of the art and technologically advanced, the club has gone for a more streamlined design than the complicated grounds popping up elsewhere in the world.

Mr Meis recorded an exclusive podcast with the club, distributed for free via the Everton Stadium newsletter, in which he answered questions for fans getting excited about the move from Goodison Park.

New Everton Stadium influenced by American baseball grounds

The Everton Stadium will be able to host 52,888 people and work began on the site in August 2021. The construction is expected to take at least three years.

Speaking on the podcast, Mr Meis referenced his passion for old baseball venues in the United States and how they influenced the design of the Everton Stadium.

These baseball grounds began as just a pitch and had stands and expansions added to them to become quirky and characterful stadiums. That led to the "lightbulb moment" of designing the Everton Stadium from the Bramley-Moore Dock site it sits on and including the bricks.

‘Not a super frilly building’

The architect said: "It's not a super frilly building. We didn't have a lot of fat in the design we could possibly have to take out.

"There was a joke early in the process about the cheese room in Tottenham, that's not who we are. There wasn't a lot of stuff like that we had to eventually lose one way or another."

Whilst the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium was being built, an exclusive in The Guardian reported that the venue would include a ‘VIP Cheese Room’ called the 'H Club' in which clients could "select their own specially sourced half-time cheese". The price of a joining fee for the club was rumoured to be £15,000 per person.

However, plans for that cheese room melted away as the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium got closer to opening.

53,000 fans to leave from one direction

On the podcast, Mr Meis was also asked about leg room compared with Goodison's tightly packed rows and the rush of fans leaving the stadium from one direction.

He said: "It's going to be better than what everyone experiences at Goodison. It's funny, on the one hand, everyone wants to pack more people in which would take away space and the other hand want big, comfortable seats. I think people will be pleasantly surprised."

Mr Meis added that local infrastructure would need to be upgraded to cope with over 50,000 fans leaving for one side and that it wouldn't be "without some challenge". He added that any compromise would be "worth the power of being in that location".