Man United rip out part of Old Trafford in £238m improvement work after Sir Jim Ratcliffe comment

Manchester United are continuing enhancements at Old Trafford by replacing hospitality seating with regular seating in the Stretford End.

Redundant seats were piled up in a skip behind the stand on Tuesday morning as part of scheduled summer works at the 114-year-old stadium.

United agreed to replace the executive seating in the stadium's most famous stand in January 2023 as part of fans' 'reclaim the Stretford End' campaign.

Members of the singing section, located just above the tunnel, are due to be reserved 1,800 seats in blocks across W205-W208 in the Stretford End.

United want to reduce the average age of matchgoers in the Stretford End and 500 existing season ticket holders aged between 16-25 were invited to submit applications to occupy the new seats.

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New United co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe has invested £238million into the club to upgrade facilities. Ratcliffe's preference is to rebuild Old Trafford on the existing site and United hope to publish formal plans in the autumn.

Ratcliffe has described Old Trafford as "run down" and the stadium failed to cope with biblical rain during the 1-0 defeat to Arsenal in May.

The Sir Bobby Charlton Stand roof leaked and water gushed down the stands. Footage also showed rain streaming down inside the tunnel and in front of balconies that accommodate hospitality guests.

"We’ve got a ground - you probably saw the headline the other day ‘The third-highest waterfall in Britain’," Ratcliffe told The Times last month.

United have explored the feasibility of a new roof and have detailed plans in place for a possible replacement on the Sir Bobby Charlton Stand. However, club sources say it would be a multi-million-pound project with multi-year engineering work that would cause significant disruption to stadium operations. United would also incur huge operational costs.

United sources said the water that gushed down from the east stand is not a leak but was a consequence of a huge volume of rain entering the siphonic roof drainage system so quickly that it caused it to overflow.

A similar waterfall developed in the roof of the Stretford End before the Manchester derby in April 2019. In December 2021, operations director Jim Liggett dismissed the leak on the fans' forum and put it down to "the siphon system that drains surface water from the roof, not by a leak in the roof itself".