Wembley at 100
WHEN SHE WAS A KID, ELLEN WHITE PLAYED Wembley. This is how you play Wembley when you’re a kid, and you’ve never actually been to Wembley: someone goes in goal and everyone else tries to score past them, and the last person to score goes out. It gets frantic. Shins are kicked. Mud cakes your knees, car-park gravel bloodies your palms. Glory beckons.
When there was no one else around, and no ball to play with, Ellen White belted whatever was to hand — cans, bottles — into goals made of sweatshirts, rocks, shoes. As soon as she got home for dinner, she would beg her parents to let her go back out. She wanted to play Wembley again, because playing Wembley was everything.
A decade or so later, and a shade under 30 miles away from her home in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, White ran onto the field at Wembley — the stadium, rather than the state of mind — as a professional footballer for the first time. She came on in the 84th minute of Team GB’s win over Brazil in the 2012 Olympics in front of 70,000 fans. She went on to play at Wembley for England, Notts County, Birmingham City and Manchester City.
For White, the experience of stepping out onto the Wembley pitch each time she has done it is hard to put into words. “You can feel it going through from your toes right to your head, and it’s just a…” She pauses, trying to find it. “It’s an indescribable feeling.”
Wembley is the ultimate for pop stars, too. Take That sold out eight nights at Wembley in 2011, and to Gary Barlow the stadium is “the business”. His bandmate Howard Donald remembers looking around at the 90,000 empty seats during a soundcheck and wondering, “How the hell we were going to fill this massive place?”
Barlow could feel the weight of “an awesome, historic” venue, which demands certain moves and catchphrases. “Just saying those words: ‘Good evening Wembley!’ Wow — Ican’t believe I’ve had the chance to say that,” he tells Esquire.
The Wembley run was, Donald says, “probably the peak, in my eyes”.
That peak can be a difficult thing to come down from. Soon after playing three nights at Wembley in 2009, Noel Gallagher realised Oasis had found the end of the road. “We sold out all the great gigs in the world,” he told Esquire in 2015. “Hollywood Bowl, Madison Square Garden, Wembley fucking Stadium.”
There was nowhere left to go after Wembley fucking Stadium. “We’ve done it all,” he thought.
“We’re only going to go round in circles now.” Two months later, Oasis split up.
WEMBLEY STADIUM CELEBRATES ITS CENTENARY this year. The largest stadium in the UK, with a seated capacity of 90,000, it stands in a large, otherwise unremarkable northwest London suburb, amid a landscape
