Premier League football club Tottenham Hotspur has ditched VMware as part of a wider datacenter and network refresh, saving itself more than 85 percent on licensing costs – though its Chief Technology Officer says the decision wasn’t purely financial.

Transforming Spurs into a winning force on the pitch remains a work in progress. Off the pitch, though, the club is nearing the end of a project to overhaul the tech inside its White Hart Lane stadium in north London.

The ground holds almost 63,000 fans and runs more than 1,650 Wi-Fi access points, 840+ under seat access points, 700 Bluetooth beacons, 20,000 network access points with 1,849 IPTV screens and 519 CCTV cameras connected. A six aisle datacenter is also sited within the arena.

Rob Pickering, CTO at Spurs, said that on the server, storage and networking side, the club has switched entirely to the HPE GreenLake portfolio, “underpinned by OpsRamp and Morpheus (VM Essentials).” HPE will run the hybrid cloud managed service.

In the datacenter, Spurs has moved to ProLiant Compute Gen12 servers and HPE Alletra storage MP. Connectivity is being upgraded to WiFi 7 and HPE Aruba Central with self-driving capabilities.

Why migrate from VMware? “Savings is a big part of the reason,” said Pickering. “It’s a significant amount, north of 85 percent,” less than the club was forking out for licensing.

“We moved away as we in put the infrastructure… over the last three months,” he added. “The issues with the Broadcom takeover of VMware are well known in terms of the commercial changes to their structure and the way that they engage with clients.”

Since buying VMware in 2023, Broadcom has discontinued certain standalone products in favour of bundles that are often pricier regardless of whether customers use every components. Broadcom seems only focused on VMware’s 10,000 to 30,000 largest customers, out of a base that numbered 350,000 before the takeover.

Pickering framed virtualisation itself as a commodity: “If it’s not built into a broader AI operation stack, the value is even lower again. Having that all connected back into an operation stack that our team can work from – one pane of glass – is worth more than just the saving that come from moving vendor A to vendor B. We do see significant savings from that, but really it’s all part of the broader story of how do we put AI ops at the heart of what we do from a technology perspective.”

He said the tech team at Spurs is relatively small, so the “ability to use AI operations to proactively see faults and remediate them without the input of a person is really critical to us.”

Spurs declined to disclose what it had been paying VMware or which VMware products it used. Pickering did, however, describe HPE VM Essentials (VME) as a “completely capable replacement.”

The Aruba network upgrade is “running late” and should be completed within a month. Getting it right matters as up to about 30,000 fans hop onto the stadium’s Wi-Fi at any given point during a game. The ground also doubles as a concert venue and hosts NFL matches and rugby league games too.

“The process of replacing all of those consistently in a non-impactful way – given the stadium operates really 365 days a year – is one of the hardest challenges of doing any technology project in a stadium. There’s no real window of downtime in stadium.”

Of course there’s the physics too: “A stadium is a giant Faraday cage. It’s glass and steel. It’s very hard to get RF to work. We make sure we build things that ensure the RS signal can travel the distance it needs to. We also need a lot of density to do that… We’re doing like 1,800 access points across the stadium in totality. So it’s significant in terms of the physical engineering challenge to get it in here, but also the radio engineering challenge.”

With Spurs losing its first two Premier League Games despite spending £300 million on new players during the summer, the club’s technology upgrades may be delivering more reliable returns than its transfer business, at least for now.