Nottingham Forest have confounded the prophets of doom on the pitch, as shown by yesterday’s win over West Ham, but updating their stadium and training ground is a more complicated and challenging story.
Inside the office of Tom Cartledge, Nottingham Forest’s
chairman, there is a collection of closely guarded designs showing how, one
day, he sees the new-look City Ground. He calls it the “master plan” and, for
those aware of the long and complex history, it is the first glimpse into a
brave new world.
That is said with a measure of restraint when, even now,
there are still obstacles to negotiate. It is one of the reasons why Evangelos
Marinakis, the club’s owner, appointed Cartledge in August: to navigate through
the issues, to help create something exciting and long-lasting and, ultimately,
change the skyline on their stretch of the River Trent.
Work has started
Take a walk across Trent Bridge and, if you look across the
water, you will see that work is underway. One of the vertical floodlights, a
fixture here for decades, was taken down this week in anticipation of planning
approval to put up a new “corner box” of executive suites. The structure
is built from shipping containers and takes its inspiration from Stadium 974 in
Qatar at the 2022 World Cup. Another is going up on the opposite side of the
Trent End and, if everything goes to plan, both will open before the end of the
season.
But there are bigger projects underway that, unreported
until now, would dramatically enhance the stadium that has been Forest’s home
for 125 years and, so Marinakis hopes, bring immense benefits for Nottingham as
a whole.
That plan will involve:
- Increasing
the stadium’s capacity to 40,000 from its current level of 29,550.
- Extending
the Bridgford Stand by another 5,000 seats, to go with replacing the
Peter Taylor Stand with a two-tier 10,000-seat replacement.
- Building
a new state-of-the-art training ground, with an announcement expected soon
about location.
- Opening
a museum in the bowels of the Trent End.
- Extending
the current lease with Nottingham City Council, which owns the land the
stadium sits on, or potentially buying the freehold.
Uppermost in Forest’s mind is finding a way to accommodate
the thousands of fans who cannot get tickets for matches — the club’s data
suggests they could have sold 50,000 tickets for a number of games since their
return to the Premier League — and that, by developing the stadium,
the club will generate huge streams of new revenue.
That extra income will, in turn, help Marinakis to continue
putting significant amounts of money into the team at a time when the owner’s
ambitions have to be aligned with the Premier League’s profitability and
sustainability (P&S) rules.
They want to stay at
their home
While Forest have talked internally about the pros and cons
of building a new stadium, that is merely because the sensible approach for any
club in their position is to debate every option. Marinakis is very clear he
wants to stay at the City Ground. He has given the green light to finance the
redevelopment and Forest would already have submitted the planning application
for the Bridgford Stand but for an ongoing issue with the lease/freehold.
Forest have been operating, as before, with a 50-year lease
agreement from 2011 and, before starting a redevelopment of this magnitude, the
club need the securities and insurance of knowing the council will not, at some
point, come up with alternative plans for what is a prime riverside location.
As it stands, there is no such guarantee.
The Council in trouble
It is, to say the least, complicated. In November, the
council issued a Section 114 notice, declaring itself, in effect, bankrupt and
meaning they will have to make all sorts of cuts to services across the city.
The government is proposing to send in commissioners to take control and, even
before that point, everything with Forest had come to a standstill, to their
intense frustration.
It should be said that there are different narratives about
who is to blame here. Local councils are
essentially agents for central government for the local provision of services
and their funding for their duties, some statutory, some not, has been cut
severely in real terms. Equally, some
councils have managed the situation better than others.
The club currently pay an annual lease of £250,000 a year
and have tried on a number of occasions to renegotiate a longer agreement. That
process has accelerated since Cartledge was made chairman. However, it is
understood the council is asking, as one option, for the annual rent to be
almost quadrupled.
When it comes to the freehold, the council values the land
as potentially a future residential area. Therefore, the figures quoted are
dramatically higher than would ordinarily be expected — and, for Forest,
unviable. It has reached an impasse and, with the council in a state of financial
crisis, there is no indication when that position might change.
The worst-case scenario for Forest is that the delays will
be considerable and the issue remains unresolved for a long time. If so, it is
feasible the club may have to rethink everything. And, yes, that would involve
looking more closely at exploring Plan B: the idea of an entirely new stadium,
perhaps further out of the city.
That, to be clear, is not Forest’s preferred option. Nor
would it make any sense for the council when its own leader, David Mellen, has
previously talked about the City Ground redevelopment helping, as part of the
wider Nottingham Southside regeneration, to bring “thousands more jobs,
millions more visitors and economic growth for the benefit of the entire city.”
Changes to P&S rules make it even more imperative for
clubs to increase their non-football revenue and, with that in mind, Forest are
keen to make the stadium a hive of lucrative activity, seven days a week. The
proposed Peter Taylor Stand includes conference and banqueting suites that
would be available to hire. The stadium will host a Take That concert this
summer and that kind of event would, in theory, become the norm outside the
football season. This is what Spurs
have been doing, albeit with greater funds and the advantage of being in the
capital.
Training ground
To Marinakis, the idea of a new training ground has been
part of his thinking since the Greek shipping magnate bought the club from
Fawaz Al-Hasawi in the summer of 2017.
All sorts of improvements have been made to upgrade the
current training ground in West Bridgford, a mile or so from Forest’s stadium.
The ground-floor space has been doubled. New buildings have gone up, pitches
have been replaced, facilities upgraded.
Always, though, the Forest hierarchy has been acutely aware
they did not have the land to create what they wanted: a purpose-built site
that could accommodate the men’s, women’s and academy teams without being
hemmed in by housing.
Forest’s current training ground falls a long way short of
the facilities at Olympiacos, Marinakis’ Greek club. Closer to home, Leicester
City’s training base, which opened in 2020 not far from the Nottinghamshire
border, is another reminder that Forest have fallen behind.
Ideally, Marinakis would like to have the training ground,
the two new stands and everything else up and running at various points between
now and the end of 2027. Work on the Peter Taylor Stand would take roughly 18
months, though it is expected the lower tier would be operational much earlier.
Forest acknowledge it is five years since the plans for the
Peter Taylor Stand were announced and that, at the time, the club let it be
known they anticipated the work starting at the end of the 2019-2020 season.
The delays have been considerable. The planning process
involved dealing with three councils and maybe, on reflection, there were
people at the club who did not fully appreciate the huge complexities of a case
that, at the last count, had 1,858 documents and 2,556 comments attached to the
planning application.
Planning obstacles
Forest have had to sign off all sorts of financial deals,
known as S106 agreements, to pay for everything from new bus stops and cycle
routes to a park-and-ride scheme and road-safety improvements, as well as
provisionally arranging for the adjacent boat club to be relocated a short
distance along the river.
There have been archaeological surveys, checks for Japanese
knotweed and wildlife experts monitoring whether there were bats or birds of
prey using the stadium. I am all for
looking after wild life, but this can get a bit OTT. Add in the Covid pandemic and objections from
local residents and… well, it hasn’t been straightforward getting to a
position, as of this week, when the last pieces of paperwork are finally being
signed off.
Forest intend to press ahead even if they drop back into the
Championship. They were getting bigger crowds in their promotion season than in
some games under Clough when they were back-to-back European Cup winners. Plus
there is evidence that it is only the logistics of the City Ground that has
prevented the club from breaking their attendance record — set in October 1967
with a crowd of 49,946 against Manchester United — since returning to the top
division.
Best wishes to this historic club in their efforts to become
more financially sustainable.
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