Manchester United’s stadium plans have been vague enough for long enough for fans to remain ambivalent. But Thursday brought a smidgen of clarity that prompted many to feel rather more anxious about it all.
It was revealed that United have identified the precise location for a new stadium. Not a redevelopment of their current home of 116 years, but a new build just down the road from Old Trafford.
There is plenty of logic in what United propose. To build outside of Old Trafford’s current footprint, 350 metres away on recently-purchased land, opens up greater possibilities and minimises disruption for the club during what is sure to be a lengthy construction period.
Sentiment, though, tends to overshadow such logic in many supporters’ thinking. This latest update has left many ‘legacy fans‘ feeling cold and even more sceptical than they were already.
The need for progress is lost on no one. Of course United need to keep pace with their current rivals and those perhaps coming over the hill in the next decade, and the Red Devils’ current home cannot sustain the evolution necessary.
But let’s do away with the notion that Old Trafford is a sh*thole. It remains one of the world’s grandest football stadiums. Yes, the roof leaks and other stadia have surpassed it for comfort and convenience, but that’s a consequence of neglect more than anything else.
The current owners have failed to invest in Old Trafford much beyond a lick of paint in 2022 – and they couldn’t even get the colour right.
To suggest Old Trafford has gone through a managed decline to make a shiny new revenue-maximising stadium necessary perhaps credits the Glazers with more nous than they deserve. The perception of Old Trafford is such because the owners have not seen fit to spend on its upkeep and development.
Regardless, such inaction brings United to a point where drastic measures are necessary. Which is unsettling enough for those with roots that run deep at Old Trafford before you consider the lack of trust in the club’s leadership to make the right moves.
Even if a definitive choice has been made over the location of United’s new home, so many questions remain around the plans that make them impossible to get excited about.
How is any new stadium being funded? Continued fury around the level of debt loaded onto the club makes that a thornier issue than it might otherwise have been, even if stadium development CEO Collette Roche suggested on Thursday that “we can get over-obsessed with debt and borrowing”.
When will United move? Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Omar Berrada have previously spoken of a time frame of five years, with a hope more than target of being in the new digs by 2030-31. Roche, though, suggested the Women’s World Cup in 2035 as a “good milestone”. That is almost certainly closer.
What will it look like? The stadium plans unveiled last year are “not set in stone”, said Roche on Thursday, which is a welcome update for anyone unimpressed by the canopy and trident masts design. They were based on the stadium being built in a different location to where United now intend to move which, hopefully, might prompt the architect to go back to his drawing board and design something more Manchester United than Dubai Circus.
On the plans for the area unveiled on Thursday, there was a generic stadium placeholder rather than anything that bore any resemblance to the previous design. More starkly, though, there was no sign or acknowledgement of United’s current home.
In Old Trafford’s place were drawn generic building blocks, presumably apartments or offices.
Hinting again at a lack of cohesion between supporters and the club’s leadership, Roche on Thursday said the priority is building the new stadium and surrounding infrastructure and facilities, which suggests United have given little to no thought over how or even whether to preserve Old Trafford’s legacy.
“At that point, we will then think, ‘What should we do with this? Should we keep it? Should we knock it down? Should we redevelop it into something different? Should it become houses? That’s going to be a consultation and also something we need to work really closely with the council on, because we’ve still collectively got to deliver the jobs, the homes, the businesses.”
Priorities will collide during this long, probably painful process, and of course the club will have to make cold, business decisions along the way, but the sentimentalists would not be unreasonable to hope for compromise, especially around the current stadium.
One of the nation’s grandest and most historic sporting stages cannot simply be bulldozed for identikit apartment buildings or anything else.
Ideally, the pitch’s footprint would be preserved; the stadium itself minimised and repurposed, perhaps as a home for United’s women’s teams, youth teams and academy. Replace the grass with artificial turf if necessary for use too as a community asset.
Whatever. Just do not raze to the ground a site that merits commemoration. And United must consult their public – and listen – rather sooner than wherever it currently is on their to-do list.
Working co-operatively with supporters is not something United – or many other clubs – tend to do well. The fear with many fans is whether they will even have a place in the new stadium.
Watching the World Cup feels jarringly like a disturbing glimpse into what United’s future might look like: matches taking place in incredible, space-age stadiums, filled with crowds of mainly corporate-types and star-gazing day-trippers, supplemented by small pockets of loyal supporters who felt they had no choice but to pay the extortionate ticket prices.
Doubtless, Ratcliffe and the Glazers will be chief among the voyeurs while Gianni Infantino lives his wet dreams. An expensive, futuristic new stadium, built in its own gaudy theme park, sounds like just the excuse some at United crave to exponentially ramp up their efforts to drive out the ‘legacies’.
By the time it’s built, if United don’t tread carefully, many will have willingly walked anyway.
