Everton FC’s tech director reports on team’s new “future proof fortress”

Goodison Park has been Everton Football Club’s home since 1892, with its last update in 1994. For a Premier League mainstay, the 39,000-seat capacity, aging architecture, and location constraints made constructing a new stadium essential for Everton’s growth.

The club first announced its preference to build on the Bramley-Moore Dock site in Liverpool in 2017 and confirmed plans to build the new 52,000-seater the following year, with main contractor Laing O’Rourke beginning work in July 2021.

For Everton’s director of technology Phil Davies, a new stadium offered an opportunity to provide fans and staff with the best matchday experience possible by freeing the club from some of the restraints inherent in operating from a century-old building.

“Retro-fitting modern technology on stadiums built hundreds of years ago is a challenge,” he tells TI. “They were built at a certain point in time, so they don’t really have the necessary infrastructure to support modern systems that require an enormous amount of space and power.”

In the modern world of events, connectivity is “no longer just a nice-to-have” he adds.

For Everton, the new venue is not solely about football – though that remains the primary function – with plans to hold other events, such as music gigs, once the stadium is live.

“It is about football. It is about concerts. It is about opening up the stadium for restaurants and premium bar experiences, or for stadium tours and immersive experiences,” explains Davies.

“Moving into a new stadium, the club wants to get people in earlier, to spend more, and to have a completely different matchday experience.”

Everton worked closely with user groups, including carrying out several surveys, to build a modern stadium that could cater for the matchday experience demanded by the modern fan.

According to Davies, connectivity was high on the list. “Fans want to be able to interact socially with the game. You have traditional fans who maybe won’t use their phones during a match, but for younger fans expect that ability to interact and connect while inside the venue.”

Getting key stakeholders on board early was also important. Everton set up a risk committee for the stadium project to look at the risks and challenges not just on matchday, but also during other events, and how these could be overcome.

“We mapped the potential pain points out and then mapped the technology against each of these,” he explains. “What are the expectations of the fans, the players, the media, the stewards and police? We mapped them into different user groups and journeys and built the technology around that.

“We got all the stakeholders in a room and looked at what we wanted to deliver and worked with them to develop strategic pillars, before we went into the design phase. And that is where HPE Aruba forms quite a central piece.”

Link-up play

Last month, Everton announced that enterprise network infrastructure provider HPE Aruba would become the club’s official connectivity supplier, contracted to supply a secure and intelligent networking infrastructure solution across the footprint of the Blues’ new home.

The new network will include switches, access points, Wi-Fi and wired network management and security software, as well as network design, management and monitoring services.

The contract isn’t just limited to the Bramley-Moore Dock site, with HPE also set to work with Everton on its six other locations.

Speaking with TI about the agreement, HPE Aruba Networking CTO UK and Ireland Simon Wilson called the agreement a “great feather in our cap”.

It isn’t the firm’s first stadium gig, having fitted out Tottenham Hotspur’s new stadium with connectivity when it went live in 2019. Aruba also recently announced an agreement to support Barcelona’s new renovated Camp Nou stadium, scheduled for completion in 2026.

Wilson believes that Tottenham’s new stadium is a flagship example of one that has been future proofed, with everything driven through the network.

“What that means is you can innovate in every area of the stadium and encourage fans to spend more time there both before and after the game. They can make a full day of it.”

Retrofitted and older stadiums often take an overhead approach, with antennas located above the fans among the stadium’s rafters. But this, adds Wilson, leads to a lot of reflections, especially when using 2.4GHz Wi-Fi – which only has three channels available.

This leads more fans to connect to the 5GHz band, but this has limited spectrum, meaning not every fan gets a good experience.

“Wi-Fi 6 will help with this,” Wilson explains. “The big advantage of a newly built stadium is you can future proof it. You can plan the technology and how it might develop in future while you’re designing the stadium.”

For this reason – as well as ease of access – Everton and HPE opted to use under seat access points (APs)  instead of the downward facing ones found in other stadiums.

There will be one AP for every 75 seats in the stadium long with several above ensure the connectivity is as reliable and accessible as possible.

“We’ve proven in pretty much every environment that the under-seat model is optimal,” explains Wilson.

“You get a higher density of access points, you get less interference, and it makes implementation and upgrading much easier than having to climb into a gantry. Also, it is more aesthetically pleasing than putting them above your head.”

Key to future proofing the technology – and linking it with Everton’s other sites – is building a cloud-native infrastructure that can be managed remotely.

The solution will be built on HPE’s Greenlake platform, which allows users to deploy and manage resources across private and public clouds while retaining control of their data and over how they consume and manage services, HPE claims.

“This will offer a lot of flexibility for Everton, but it also can help the team identify opportunities for improvement or to fix problems quickly,” says Wilson.

“It comes with built in telemetry which we can then compare with other sites, which can all be managed from Aruba Central,” he adds.

Game on

Everton selected HPE after an open tender process, which saw several major tech firms whittled down to just two frontrunners. This was carried out during Covid, with all the concurring concerns around supply chains.

“We worked out our key goals and put out an RFI [request for information],” explains Everton’s Phil Davies.

So, what does an organisation like Everton put into an RFI of this scale?

“Key was the connectivity element, and security was also a big concern for us,” Davies explains. “Visibility over the network was also really important, and making sure the infrastructure sits in the cloud, so we can see what is happening across all sites at all times, but especially during the matchday window.”

Davies needed to be able to centrally manage the network from Everton’s head office, located in the century-old Royal Liver Building on Liverpool’s historic waterfront.

“It’s not just the stadium – we are spread over 10 sites. We need to centralise our network because we run a small team but we need to be able to see what is happening across the entire network.”

Besides the new stadium, and traditional home Goodison Park, Davies and his team looks after networking in other sites including the club’s Finch Farm training ground, the Liver Building HQ, several community campuses across Merseyside, and even a school the club runs, located next to Goodison.

Sustainability was also a key consideration. On matchday, Everton will see over 50,000 data points flock to the new stadium, as well as managing activities going on at the other sites.

With music gigs,  this number could be higher. Yet for the other six days in a week, there will be less people in the ground, meaning the network needs to be scalable and flexible, and power sensitive for those times where it is less busy.

“We were really impressed with HPE and their approach to scalability, as it is really hands on. The company  invited us to see the technology in similar arenas and they will act much more like a partner.”

The Everton Stadium is due to open for the 2025-26 Premier League season and will be one of the UK’s host venues during the UEFA Euro 2028 championships.

For Davies, establishing the network and testing it before the season’s end—when Everton will host several trial events with fans—is a pressing yet thrilling deadline. His team will be handed the stadium in December, and then the implementation begins.

“We are on schedule – in fact, maybe a little bit ahead,” he smiles. “We are transitioning from the old network to the new cloud-based one across all of our sites, and we are already working on the operational plans for kick-off.”

With the new stadium will come an updated Everton app which aims to boost the experience of fans attending games. It is part of a wider digital overhaul at the club.

“It is important we get the experience right from day one,” he concludes. “It is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. With everything we are putting in place, we think fans will be surprised, but they will also really enjoy the experience.

“You want your home stadium to be a fortress and I’ve been into the new ground a lot, and at pitch level, it is quite intimidating – that is nice. If we can bring that experience for the fans, then from an atmosphere perspective, it will really meet expectations.”