Crunch stadium meeting for Newcastle

Representatives of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund will fly into the North East next week for a crunch “off-site” meeting about Newcastle United.

In previous years these meetings have taken place in the grandiose surroundings of Alnwick Castle, as captured by Amazon’s fly-on-the-wall series, We Are Newcastle United.  It is not known where the meeting will take place this time but the chief executive, Darren Eales, is expected to be there, as is the sporting director, Paul Mitchell, and Jacobo Solis, recently appointed to the club’s board of directors.

There are two potential plans left on the table. One is to stay on the present site and expand the Gallowgate End to a capacity of 60,000 (it cannot go bigger because of restrictions to the East Stand). The other is to build a new stadium, a giant bowl structure, beyond the Leazes End, in Leazes Park, with a capacity of 70,000.

The Times understands that senior figures have already been walked around the potential Leazes Park site and there is now an increased expectation in higher echelons that the club could be ready to move.  The London-based architects KSS, who designed Leicester’s training ground, have been in meetings with Newcastle about a potential new stadium since before October last year.

Can Newcastle justify a 70,000-seat stadium? Tyneside, including areas north and south of the Tyne, has a population of about a million people. Newcastle Upon Tyne itself has a population of 300,000. But then it is full of football fanatics.

The big question that has not been addressed so far is how a new stadium or an upgrade to St James’ Park will be funded. Everton’s new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock cost £850million and the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, which opened in 2019, was £1billion.

Figures from Off the Pitch, an expert website on football finances, show Tottenham’s match-day revenue was £52.7million in 2017. In 2023 it had increased to £135.2million. Chelsea, in the same period, and without a new ground, showed a much more moderate rise, from £76.2million in 2017 to £87.9million in 2023.

When Newcastle previously presented a detailed questionnaire to supporters last summer, 71 per cent were in favour of staying at St James’ Park.

St James’ Park is one of the ten chosen stadiums to host the European Championships in 2028. Renovation or a new stadium would need to be completed six months before the competition for it still to be part of the tournament, a spokesman from Uefa said.