New Old Trafford will be frighteningly expensive but well worth the money

Old Trafford
Old Trafford

There would be, “no football club in the British Isles able to boast of better headquarters”, reported the Manchester Guardian. A stadium capacity of 80,000, with a sixth of them afforded the luxury of a roof. For the players, “a billiard-room, a recreation-room, a massage-room, a gymnasium”. For the general public, a tea-room. For the newspaper reporters no less than an “electric lift” to take them up to their press seating.

More than 115 years later, most of us can still just about manage the stairs, and the football stadium built at Old Trafford, eventually opened in 1910, has not done badly. It was sited on land owned by John Henry Davies, the Mancunian brewing tycoon who rescued the old railway works club Newton Heath and oversaw their transformation into Manchester United. At the time, it was a radical move away from United’s core support in their east Manchester heartland of Clayton. No professional club, at that point in history, had moved further from their original home.

United have done nothing as ambitious in the interim which means the Old Trafford regeneration project announced this week, is long overdue. Football, whether one likes it or not, is a reliable driving force for regeneration. The great Victorian clubs are, in many parts, the last vestiges of a lost industrial past and the communities that served it. For the sake of moving a giant rail terminal, the adjoining Freightliner to the west, it feels like a deal worth making.

Not that one should underplay the significance of the yards that abut Old Trafford, elegantly described – by no less an authority than World Cargo News – as “in the world of intermodal logistics, the premiership of rail freight terminals”. The rebuilding of the area around Old Trafford into a destination worthy of the name feels like it is playing to the city’s strengths – even if it can be hard to listen to billionaires complain about how much all this is going to cost.

Sir Jim Ratcliffe, now a minority shareholder, majority influence at United, has pitched his message about rebuilding Old Trafford a little awkwardly. But the club is now clear: no public money for the stadium, whether that is refit or new-build.

The more difficult argument is whether public money can be used on the moving of the Freightliner terminal. The project appears to be advancing the case that the benefit to the West Coast mainline and the necessary updates to Manchester’s main Piccadilly terminal supports investment of public money. That will need to be made beyond doubt. Public money should mean a public benefit, and government and football are yet to finesse that.

Whatever United get will not compare to the bargain that Manchester City negotiated at what is now the Etihad. The taxpayer spent £49 million converting the City of Manchester stadium, as it was then, built with lottery funding, to a permanent home for the blue side of the city. When Thaksin Shinawatra sold the club to Sheikh Mansour in 2008 for £150 million, the new stadium affected the price achieved, with no reward for the taxpayer investment.

The corporation tasked with the legacy of the London 2012 Olympics Stadium learned from that and introduced a clause in its 99-year lease with West Ham, an astonishing deal for the club that currently stands at just £3.6 million per annum. That clause stipulated that if West Ham were sold within 10 years then a levy would be payable to the corporation. Agreed in 2013, it expired last year.

No such deal is available for United, just as there was none for Arsenal or for Tottenham, United’s opponents on Sunday – both of whom have had to manage an attendant period of new-stadium austerity. That is the challenge for ownership, and the longer it is left, the more daunting it feels. United’s stadium choices are complicated but they are nothing like as fraught as those facing Chelsea.

For Arsenal, the great challenge pre-construction was acquiring the Ashburton Grove site, home to a large waste plant. For Spurs it was the businesses around White Hart Lane. For United, it may be the freight terminal or something else. Essentially a new stadium requires a club to become a property development business while also running a football team on the side – which is never easy.

Lesson from history

There is another lesson from history worth heeding: every new stadium initially looks like it will cost too much. The new Wembley was an epic initiative which was excruciating at times for the developers, the Football Association. The cost, which included the acquisition of the original stadium, crept ever upwards to the final total of £757 million – vast at the time.

Yet now, just 25 years on from the decision to go ahead, and however much Wembley continues to divide opinion, it feels absurd to imagine the FA not having done it. In fact, those in charge would have done well to go further. Had fear of public outcry not stopped the FA, it would have spent millions more on the car parks that have now been developed into housing and make securing the stadium more difficult.

As for Old Trafford, one of the most famous football destinations in the world, the stadium and its environs have been grotty for years. Like Anfield, it is woefully underserved by public transport, and marooned in acres of drab car parks. The time has come for a bold new plan – how the Glazers and Ratcliffe pay for it, is something else.

“Along Clayton Road they came, and over Trafford Bridge, in trams, buses, cabs, taxis, costers’ carts, coal lorries and all strange manner of things on wheels.” That was the Manchester Guardian, describing the 50,000 crowd on its way to the first game at Old Trafford in February 1910. It was by no means plain sailing – by the 1930s attendances had slipped below 12,000, and United were rescued by the intervention of the only other great owner in their history, James W Gibson.

Gibson then rebuilt Old Trafford after the war, restoring what Davies had begun. For Ratcliffe, another wealthy industrialist, that is a select group to join. As with those two predecessors, it will be neither cheap nor simple.