Not it wasn’t - once construction started all land was in place - and then it was delayed by another year and blew past the 1 billion mark
If you work in the industry you’ll know for a final/tender estimate BoQ is - and we ran way past that. I do this for a living and Levy cocked this up massively through micro management and NFL bullshit
Again, you keep wanting to lump "NFL bullshit" into the stadium and blame the multi-field functionality. Before ground was ever broken, when the steel works was still in place, the multi-field functionality was already incorporated in the plans and schedule. So there is zero way it impacted the schedule, zero.
Have you seen the actual BoQ figures? Not the estimates that were publicized in the press, which are always notoriously low (Wembley, for instance, was touted to cost £450M - it cost twice that). I've not seen anything credible on what the bid was, but I'd be interested in seeing firm figures.
Either way, I've just cited Wembley which ran over budget. The Olympic stadium was touted in the 2012 bid book at £280M but ended up at a total cost of £700M (there's some obscurity on whether or not the initial construction costs were limited to around £500M or not, but still nearly doubled in cost). Scumirates was preliminarily touted at £250M, ended up at £350M (sounds small, but that's a 40% cost overrun). Millennium Stadium in Cardiff ballooned from £96M to more than £120M (25% cost overrun).
I could find even more figures for large construction projects if you expand the scope of the investigation from just UK stadiums to all large construction works. The Shard, for example, was forecast to cost £620M in planning and ended up costing £2.1B. Cherry picked example there, but its true of most any project of any size.
The general problem is the difficulty in forecasting costs. When you develop a schematic budget you don't see all the odds and ends, so a lot of time you're just throwing an adjustment factor in and hoping it accounts for everything. You're also developing the budget in today's pounds based on last year's data. In the world of smaller projects that move quicker, not as much of an issue. In the world of projects that take years to complete...there's a big issue. Thats why most these large construction contracts contain an element of
cost plus - here's the bid based on this schedule of material costs, say steel costs £1/lb (I'm spitpalling, I have no idea what your material costs are), and as those prices rise the contract rises to accommodate those costs out of the owner's pocket and not the contractor.
Unfortunately for Spurs, the stadium was constructed in one of the more volatile periods for construction materials. Prices have been soaring in the past half decade - no one was accounting for just how much costs would explode. In the US, in the past decade the cost of ready-mix concrete and steel increased more than 20% between 2012 and 2016 based on the cost estimating data I just looked up (out of the data books we utilize in-office) and another 30%+ since 2016.
Construction costs have massively increased, thats just a simple fact. Anfield's £60M stand is going to cost £80M+ now. Its simply the nature of the business.