Where is the £2bn Manchester United needs to raise in order to replace its historic but decrepit 74,000-seater Old Trafford ground, to the west of Manchester city centre 9(n Salford) going to come from?.
In Cannes, at the international property trade show,
United’s chief operating officer Collette Roche insisted there had been
significant interest in investing in the new stadium. “We’re having lots of
conversations around where we can get different revenue streams from, really
positive conversations . . . we believe it does stack up,” she told the Financial Times.
Andy Green, finance spokesman at Manchester United
Supporters Trust and head of investment at private equity firm Rockpool
Investments, welcomed the proposal, but said financing is where it “gets really
complicated”. “They’ve got £731mn of debt, plus £291mn owed to other clubs,” he
said of United. “That’s secured on absolutely everything, so they can only
borrow more by refinancing what they’ve got.”
The club is therefore
starting from “quite a bad position” compared with Tottenham Hotspur, he said,
which borrowed to build its £1.2bn new ground after starting with no debt at
all. Spurs also borrowed when interest rates were far lower, and have
since said they would be unable to repeat the project, completed in 2019, in
the current investment climate.
Naming rights for the new stadium would certainly help raise
cash, said Green, while profits from property redevelopment in the surrounding
area could theoretically make it easier to borrow substantial amounts.
Nevertheless, those potential property gains remain “completely unclear”, he
said.
Key to the ambitious stadium design — a vast tent-like
structure with three masts — is the relocation of the rail company Freightliner
next door. The freight group occupies land to the west of the current Old
Trafford stadium, on to which the club now wants to expand.
Three people familiar with the proposals said United could
build a stadium without moving on to that site, but it would be more difficult
and not as eye-catching as the version currently proposed. Mayor Burnham and
the club’s pitch for more than £200mn in government money would fund moving
Freightliner 25 miles away to the proposed ILP North logistics hub in St
Helens, Merseyside.
As well as the funding for United’s new stadium and
surrounding regeneration, the timeframe remains in question. While Roche said
in Cannes that the ground would be built within five to six years using a
modular construction process, the planning process and public inquiry required
for the new freight hub in St Helens is expected to take until 2029.
Despite no public funding being sought for the ground
itself, critics still believe the optics of the government assisting a club
co-owned by Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the billionaire founder of chemicals group Ineos
who is resident in Monaco for tax purposes, are toxic in the current climate.
“It is intolerable that public money, at a time of cuts in welfare spending,
should be used to help a tax exile,” said Manchester Labour MP Graham Stringer,
a United fan who as council leader helped secure the Commonwealth Games for the
city in 2002. United’s rivals Manchester City moved into the Games’ venue a
year after the event.
peaking to the Pink ‘Un in Cannes (before he was defeated in
his bid to be Olympics supremo), Lord Sebsatian Coe — a member of the task
force drawing up regeneration plans around Old Trafford — insisted the plan
would be economically transformational, arguing that it would be the first
football-led growth project of its kind. “With all due respect to lots of the
stadiums that have been built in the UK, they’re just stadiums,” he said,
referencing Arsenal’s Emirates and Tottenham’s new ground.
The plans for Old Trafford are far more ambitious, Coe said.
The club claims 92,000 jobs could be created by the project, more than twice as
many as those who work at the adjacent Trafford Park industrial hub. Coe said
he had spoken directly with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer about the plans and
had “very good, supportive observations” from Reeves’ office. “There
really does have to be a recognition that the multiplier effect off the back of
this stadium is profound.”
Words are cheap, investment needs hard cash.
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