When investors and global developers gathered in the French Riviera two weeks ago for the Mipim real estate fair, there was no lack of exaggerations on Manchester United plans for a new £ 2 billion stadium.
The replacement proposed by one of the world’s most famous football clubs of his Old Trafford Stadium can trigger more regeneration than the 2012 Olympic Games, former Lord Sebastian Coe Olympics said on stage, making him “the greatest venture” in Europe.
Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham told the Financial team that he expected more than £ 200 million (R $ 1.5 billion) in British Transport government investments to allow the construction of the stadium, unlocking a local growth program “that would overshadow all the rest.”
The presentation in Cannes was part of a coordinated lobby operation to obtain funding during government spending review in June.
The Premier League club and its sponsors glimpsed 17,000 new houses around a stadium designed by Norman Foster with a capacity of 100,000 seats. Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who had already publicly supported the project, now sees the so -called “New Trafford” as one of her great bets to boost growth outside London.
However, there are still unanswered questions about the proposals.
Among the most significant is the need for the club to collect £ 2 billion to replace its history but decaying, 74,000 -seat Old Trafford Stadium, west of Manchester city center.
In Cannes, United’s director of operations, Collette Roche, insisted that there was a significant interest in investing in the new stadium.
“We are having a lot of conversations about where we can get different sources of recipe, really positive conversations … We believe it makes sense,” she told Financial Times.
Andy Green, Financial spokesman for Manchester United Supporters Trust and chief investment at Private Equity Rockpool Investments, welcomed the proposal, but said the financing is where the situation “is really complicated.”
“They have £ 731 million debt (R $ 5.4 billion), in addition to £ 291 million (R $ 2.2 billion) due to other clubs,” he said on United. “This is guaranteed in its entirety, so they can only borrow more refining what they have.”
The club is therefore starting with “a very bad position” compared to Tottenham Hotspur, he said, who borrowed to build his new £ 1.2 billion stadium after starting without any debt. The Spurs also borrowed when interest rates were much lower and since then they said they could not repeat the project, completed in 2019, in the current investment climate.
The rights of ‘Naming Rights’ for the new stadium would certainly help raise money, Green said, while profits for the surrounding area’s remodeling could theoretically facilitate the loan of substantial amounts. However, these potential real estate gains remain “completely uncertain,” he said.
The key to the ambitious stadium design – a vast three -mast tent -shaped structure – is the relocation of the Freightliner Railway company next door.
The cargo group occupies land west of the current Old Trafford Stadium, to which the club now wants to expand. Three people familiar with the proposals said that United could build a stadium without moving to the site, but it would be more difficult and not as attractive as the proposed version today.
Burnham and the club’s proposal of more than £ 200 million in the government would finance Freightliner’s change to 40 km away to the ILP North Logistics Center in St Helens, Merseyside.
They argue that the change would not only make room for the new stadium, but it would also remove load trains from the Castlefield de Manchester corridor-where they currently blend with long-distance, regional and passenger transport services in one of the country’s worst rail bottlenecks-redirecting them to West Coast Mainline.
This would have the same benefits as a discarded proposal to build extra railway capacity through the Manchester Center, Burnham said.
“This is one fifth, a quarter of the cost of the other plan to relieve congestion in the center of Manchester,” he said, referring to proposals that included two new platforms at Piccadilly station. “The increase in capacity is – they said – as good as building platforms 15 and 16.”
Six rail experts and transportation staff told Financial teams that redirect load traffic would actually release some space through Castlefield.
But none of them agreed that it would be the equivalent of the original updates, revealed in 2014 by the then chancellor George Osborne.
“No chance,” said programming expert William Barter, who worked on the HS2 rail project before retiring. “You can’t argue that taking a load train per hour does the same as an entire pair of extra rails.”
Nor is it clear how extra freight would affect the busy West Coast Mainline, which connects London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. Plans to increase the capacity of the line disappeared with the northern part of HS2 by the previous government.
Two employees separately summed up attempts to move loads on a rail system underline as a problem that is difficult to solve.
Like financing for the new United stadium and the surrounding regeneration, the schedule remains in question.
Although Roche said in Cannes that the land would be built within five to six years using a modular construction process, the planning process and public consultation needed for the new St. Helens load center should last by 2029.
A united source said the stadium construction could start before Freightliner’s complete relocation, however, using a “short -term land change.”
Although there is no public funding for the stadium itself, critics still believe that the government assisting a shared -owned club of Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the founding billionaire of the chemical group Ineos, who is resident in Monaco for tax purposes, is toxic in the current climate.
“It is intolerable that public money, at a time of social spending cuts, be used to help a tax exile,” said Manchester Labor Deputy Graham Stringer, a United fan who, as a board leader, helped secure Commonwealth games to the city in 2002. United rivals Manchester City.
Speaking to the ft in Cannes, a member of the task force that elaborates the remodeling plans around Old Trafford-insisted that the plan would be economically transformative, arguing that it would be the first growth project led by football.
“With all due respect to many of the stadiums that were built in the UK, they are just stadiums,” he said, referring to Arsenal Emirates and the new Tottenham stadium.
Old Trafford plans are much more ambitious, ”Coe said. The club states that 92,000 jobs could be created by the project, more than double those who work at the adjacent industrial hub Trafford Park.
Coe said he spoke directly to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer about the plans and had “very good and supported observations” from Reeves’s Office.
“There really has to be a recognition that the multiplier effect behind this stadium is deep.”
