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When Saracens filled the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium with 61,214 spectators for The Showdown against Harlequins in March 2024, they set a new attendance record for the fixture at a Premier League football ground. It was the latest chapter in a long relationship: since the game went professional in 1995, at least five Premiership clubs have called a football stadium home, and one of them still does.
Ashton Gate shows the overlap best. Bristol Bears and Bristol City play on the same pitch, sometimes on consecutive days, and plenty of supporters follow both. For the football half of that weekend, comparisons of the best football betting app options now judge live streaming on football coverage alone, after testing 19 UK-licensed apps through a full summer. A rugby fan using the same app for Saturday’s City game needs to check it shows football at all, since several stream only racing and greyhounds.
No club leaned on football grounds as much as Wasps. In 1996, the professional side became part of Loftus Road Holdings, which also owned Queens Park Rangers, and moved from its traditional Sudbury home to Loftus Road in Shepherd’s Bush.
When that arrangement ended in 2002, Wasps became tenants of Wycombe Wanderers at Adams Park in High Wycombe, where they stayed for 12 seasons. Crowds rose by around a third after the move, but the club only part-owned the ground.
In 2014, Wasps bought the Ricoh Arena in Coventry, home of Coventry City, for a reported £20 million. The 32,000-seat stadium gave them a larger capacity and a new market in the West Midlands. Eight years later, in October 2022, the club went into administration with debts of around £95 million and dropped out of the Premiership.
Saracens spent the late 1990s and the 2000s at Watford’s Vicarage Road, a 22,000-seat ground-share that began in 1997. The first Premiership seasons there brought the club its first major trophy, the 1998 Tetley’s Bitter Cup, won at Twickenham with a 48-18 final against Wasps.
Vicarage Road also hosted one of the most lopsided results in the club’s history, a 151-0 win over Dinamo Bucure?ti in October 2002. Saracens left after around 15 years for their own ground at Copthall in Hendon, now the StoneX Stadium. They have kept a foothold in football stadiums through The Showdown, which will stay at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium until at least 2028 under an extended partnership with the Premier League club.
In the North West, Sale Sharks left Heywood Road, their home since 1905, for Stockport County’s Edgeley Park in 2003. The move came with the club’s most successful period: Sale won the Premiership title in 2006 while playing in Stockport.
The ground-share lasted until 2012, when Sale moved to a purpose-built stadium in Salford, now the CorpAcq Stadium, which they share with rugby league rather than football.
London Irish outgrew their spiritual home at The Avenue in Sunbury in the early professional years. After a season at the Stoop in 1999, they became tenants of Reading Football Club at the Madejski Stadium in 2000 and stayed for two decades.
In 2020, the club moved back towards west London as tenants of Brentford at the new 17,250-capacity Brentford Community Stadium. The arrangement ended in 2023, when London Irish were suspended from the Premiership amid financial problems.
Bristol are now the only Premiership club whose regular home is a Football League ground. After 93 years at the Memorial Ground, which they left to Bristol Rovers, the rugby club moved permanently to Ashton Gate for the 2014-15 season.
Both clubs are owned by Steve Lansdown, and the ground was rebuilt around them between 2014 and 2016, bringing capacity to around 27,000. That makes it the largest regular home in the Premiership, and it has become a hard place for visitors to win. When Bristol came from 12 points down to beat Bath 21-19 in the West Country derby at the end of last season, it extended a run in which Bath have not won a league match at the ground since 2008.
The pattern across these clubs is consistent. A football stadium offered capacity, corporate facilities and a modern venue almost overnight, at a time when rugby clubs needed to meet league standards quickly. In return, the rugby clubs were usually tenants, with limited control over pitch scheduling, catering and match-day revenue.
The clubs that settled long-term either owned the stadium outright, as Bristol’s owners do, or built their own. Wasps and London Irish, the two clubs most dependent on renting or buying into football grounds, both collapsed in the 2020s. Saracens’ model, a smaller home ground plus one annual match at a Premier League stadium, now looks like the template most clubs can afford.
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