New stadiums boom

While many of us downed tools over the holiday period, the sports stadium building boom continued without a pause and the new year has seen things ramp up.  On Thursday, US-owned Premier League team Leeds United secured planning permission to expand Elland Road to a capacity of 53,000.

Earlier in the week, Nottingham Forest — owned by Greek billionaire Evangelos Marinakis — unveiled plans to redevelop the City Ground, with a view to taking capacity there north of 50,000 one day too.

Crystal Palace, which announced redevelopment plans for Selhurst Park eight years ago, may soon start putting spades in the ground.  Further down the English football pyramid, Millwall secured a new 999-year lease on its stadium, The Den, which will help clear the way for a potential expansion and upgrade there too.

Work to build a new stand at Wrexham is now under way, while Birmingham City’s eye-catching designs are still fresh off the printing press.

As the UK economy has sputtered in recent years, football clubs have been pushing ahead with stadium investment. Some hope these projects can help catalyse wider regeneration, with many football stadiums located in places in sore need of a boost, e.g., the CBS Stadium in North Coventry.

Demand to watch live sport is strong (Leeds has a waiting list for season tickets of 26,000), while financing these projects may be getting a bit easier as more specialist lenders start to take an interest. Wrexham’s construction work — which is linked to a far broader regeneration plan for the entire town — is being part-financed by Apollo.

Football’s new financial rules are also pushing clubs to find ways to boost revenue over the long-term so they can spend more on players.

As more institutional money pours into sport, we can expect more and more stadium upgrades. Many investors see hard infrastructure (and the reliable revenue from ticketing, hospitality and advertising that come with it) as the safest way to access the sector. That should in turn make accessing capital easier for teams, and alter calculations about whether a costly construction project is really worth pursuing.

In recent years it’s been easy to point out that sports lawyers are being kept busy. But the architects, civil engineers and building companies are very much in demand too.

Of course, new stadiums are not always loved.   The London Stadium was not built for West Ham, even though they got a good financial deal on it.  As an athletics stadium, it lacks the atmosphere of Upton Park.