Inside the transformation of Arsenal FC

Since 1999 Arsenal Football Club had been planning a move from its home at Highbury in North London.

Not least in these considerations was the role IT now plays in the big-business world of Premiership football, and Highbury had never been built with cabling, computers or server rooms in mind.

Adrian Ford, commercial director at Arsenal, said: "Highbury was like an antique. It was fabulous to look at but you wouldn't really want to use it."

The new ground is just 500 metres from the turnstiles of Highbury, built on the site of one of North London's largest rubbish dumps (Tottenham fans insert your own joke here).

The stadium cost £263m to build and was seven years in the planning. Overall the project will cost £450m including the building of alternative refuse facilities – a project which cost £63m alone. The entire project is expected to be finished by 2010.

It includes 150 corporate boxes which go for between £75,000 and £150,000 each per season. Then there are 6,700 premium seats going for around £2,500 to £4,500 each and 160 Diamond club seats. The Diamond club costs £25,000 to join and £25,000 per season for two seats.

It is obvious that football is embracing its big-business status.

Ford said: "If you're wealthy and you want the best facilities to watch football, you can buy that here."

Making such a slick – some might say sterile, and certainly corporate - operation run smoothly relies heavily upon IT – something that couldn't be said of the club's previous home.

Ford said: "IT is absolutely crucial here. It used to be the case that the amount of IT required on a match day was minimal."

But that is far from the case now, with everything from the turnstiles, accessed using contactless smart card 'Club Cards', to the electronic point-of-sale units at more than 300 catering points all connected to the network.

"If all this stuff went down we would have real problems," said Ford.

Paul Farmer is the head of IT at Arsenal and has overseen many of the changes, having been with the club for more than 10 years. The move to the new stadium saw Farmer's IT budget upped considerably to around £16m.

"Everything from buying a pint or a scarf to passing through a turnstile is reliant upon IT," said Farmer, adding that even the digital advertising hoardings around the ground are networked.

The stadium has 80 wireless access points, 500 electronic point of sale (EPOS) tills, more than 100 smart card-enabled turnstiles, also capable of reading bar codes on anything from paper tickets to MMS messages on mobile phones – allowing for scaleable ticketing options in the future.

Of the 60 servers deployed within the stadium, 15 are dealing solely with hospitality systems, compared to two dedicated to the club's website.

Most of the servers are from Dell. "I do try to be consistent in terms of who our providers are," said Farmer. "Ninety per cent are Dell though we have got some HP, unfortunately."

It's a complex network and one which Farmer admits proved a daunting challenge to set up.

"This was an intimidating scenario for the IT department," Farmer added, especially given his eight-man IT team didn't increase in size when it moved from the low-tech environs of Highbury to the Emirates Stadium.

But the club wasn't without examples to follow. The club admits it has taken its lead to a degree from US sports stadiums where Arsenal's goal of a cashless environment is already becoming a reality. This move is being driven in part by the US catering company Arsenal employs, who brought experience of cashless EPOS to Emirates Stadium.

The move towards card-only transactions – and preferably club-issued smart cards at that, which can be topped up with cash and spent anywhere in the ground – means the club can capture a great deal more data on its customers than before, enabling it to tailor marketing activities more effectively. Arsenal uses CRM software from Cyber to streamline the processing and analysis of this data.

Farmer's eight-man team manages 1,000 devices including those 60 servers, more than 300 PCs and the 500 EPOS. As such, careful monitoring of the network and systems is essential. The reliance upon IT means potential problems must be spotted before they arise.

"Being reactive may have worked at Highbury but not any more," said Farmer, who employs CA's management software widely across the network to this end, as well as the US software giant's Mail Manager and XOSoft services for email archiving and retrieval and failover and disaster recovery respectively.

Farmer says the latter service means: "If there is a catastrophic failure on our email server or ticketing systems we can move over to a failover."

With a potential 70-plus games per season in all, downtime on any core system would be hugely problematic – on ticketing it could have huge consequences for the business.

In fact, although the IT is hardly pervasive, visitors to the stadium might be forgiven for thinking the only thing it doesn't have an impact on is the performance of the players.

However, one of the 60 servers the stadium houses is given over to running the Pro-Zone application which processes player data to analyse the work done by every single player on the pitch to help the management team spot weaknesses in everything from formation and tactics to work rate.

But it remains to be seen what trophies all this IT can actually help the club to win.