Out-of-town football stadia ‘a mistake’

A KEY man behind the new generation of out-of-town football stadia across the UK believes the trend for building new grounds away from urban centres has been a mistake.

Ex-footballer Paul Fletcher helped mastermind developments like the Alfred McAlpine Stadium (now John Smith’s Stadium), home to Huddersfield Town, the Reebok Stadium for Bolton Wanderers (now the Macron), the new Wembley Stadium  and Coventry City’s Ricoh Arena.

Fletcher, 64, now runs a company called StadiArena and has patents in 16 countries on a new concept which enables an indoor arena to be created inside a football ground.

But he reckons a trick has been missed by failing to provide community facilities and helping to regenerate the traditional areas where the old grounds were built in towns and cities in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Bolton-born Fletcher, a striker for Wanderers before he moved in one of the most expensive deals in English football to Burnley in 1970, became chief executive of the project to build the club’s £40m Reebok Stadium in the mid-90s, and even negotiated the naming rights with the US sports shoe giant, which had its roots in the town.

“Now, if I could turn the clock back 20 years, I’d do it where Burnden Park (the former Wanders ground), not far from Bolton centre, was,” he told TheBusinessDesk.

“I reckon they would have ended up getting up to 40,000 fans going there, instead of the 20,000 to 30,000 supporters the new ground accommodates.

“Because for many people, football has lots of memories, and when you walk down a road or a cobbled street, you remember, not only the game you’re going to, but going there with your granddad.

“You don’t have those memories with new stadia. New stadia are so clinical and safe – you remember the odd goal being scored there, but you don’t have the family memories of that type of thing.

“I think we could’ve done it at Bolton. But it’s nobody’s fault and I’m not pointing the finger at the directors of Bolton or anyone else.

“A lot of councils, mistakenly in my view now, want football clubs out of town because they think they’re moving trouble out of town, and because often with a football game there’s people urinating in the gardens and being drunk and fighting.

“So they think they move all that, and it does, but it doesn’t work for the area.”

Fletcher said that even as a 16-year-old apprentice footballer at Bolton he remembers looking round the empty Burnden Park ground and thinking “how can this be used for something else?”.

“You look at the current stadium and you think ‘there’s not much activity there’. It just stands idle through the week and only comes alive on match days.

“One of the analogies I use when I talk about this is: Imagine building a hotel that cost £40m and only opening once a fortnight. You’d never do it, but for some reason we do it when we build football stadia.”

It is that philosophy which has informed the thinking behind Fletcher’s current projects for the latest generation of multi-use stadia as part of the StadiArena concept and which has attracted more than £2m of investment from backers.

The first model of the new concept is currently under construction in Ahmedabad, India, supported by the country’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, although Fletcher said the new StadiArena concept has arrived too late to benefit football grounds in the UK

“The owners of this stadium are building a football ground with no team, but they’ve built a commercial building that will make a profit,” said Fletcher. “Eventually they will buy a football franchise.

“With the knowledge I have now – not wanting to seem like a smarty pants – we have learned that you can multi-use stadia.

“The way you multi-use a pitch is not by having rock concerts on it or rugby. You lift it up seven metres, then you’ve got  a massive space underneath so instead of having turnstiles all around the ground, you’ve got Starbucks, Boots, or a travel agent and suddenly it becomes part of the community.

“If you’re clever, you can have your football in the middle, and there is nothing to stop you having the top band as a university and student accommodation. So then you’ve got everything – we call it the hamburger stadium.”

Alongside the Indian venture StadiArena is also involved in a 22,000 seater stadium at Rowan University in Philadelphia, including a basketball arena, as global interest in Fletcher’s ideas grows.

Meanwhile, Fletcher works three days a week as managing director of UCFB (University College of Football) at Burnley FC’s Turf Moor Stadium. The UCFB concept has also been rolled out at Wembley and last week at Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium.