Structure before commitment.

There is a temptation to treat structuring as paperwork before the real work. It is the reverse. The way an investment is structured — how risk is allocated, how capital is sequenced, how obligations are contracted — decides most of what can go wrong later.

Four questions before any commitment

Is the capital structure resilient? It is tested against delay, cost overrun and a weaker market — not against the base case alone.

Is each risk held by the party best placed to manage it? Construction, supply, regulatory and market risk each need an owner, and the price of carrying them needs to be explicit.

Is the regulatory pathway real? Permits, consents and approvals are mapped in sequence, with the dependencies that finance and procurement rely on.

Is every obligation contracted to a named party? A responsibility shared by everyone is held by no one.

Why the discipline pays

London Arena treats the structuring stage as the decisive one. Before anyone commits, the capital structure is tested for resilience rather than optimism, regulatory and ESG risk is screened, and every obligation is mapped to a named, accountable party. It is slower at the start and far cheaper at the end.

Commitment is easy to give and expensive to unwind. The discipline of structuring first is what lets a programme move quickly later — because the hard questions were answered while they were still cheap to answer.