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Manchester United have said their proposed new 100,000-capacity stadium may lead to further debt being loaded on the club but insisted it would be “a sanity, not vanity project”.
Plans for United’s new home were unveiled on Thursday and showed it would be built 350 metres north-west of the current Old Trafford. The club are about £1.3bn in debt and in March 2025 Omar Berrada, United’s chief executive, said £2bn was the working cost of the stadium.
Collette Roche, the chief executive of the stadium project, said of whether the cost would change: “That is the $2bn question. We can look at what other stadiums cost but we’re going to be building a very different stadium, bigger than any other: 100,000 seats. So there is not a price I can go to. We’ve still got all funding options available: we can have debt, equity, shares, other investors. We’ve had a lot of approaches. People saying: ‘Can I be part of this?’
“This needs to be a sanity project, not a vanity project. You’ve seen from the way we now run the club, having control of our costs is really important. You’ve seen where we are financially, which we are improving. It will be on us to deliver to the time and budget.”
Since Sir Jim Ratcliffe bought into United two years ago the club have been on a finance-tightening drive, a major part of this being about 450 redundancies.
Roche said: “I know things can go out of control. People said that with me on Carrington [the training ground development]: ‘You’re never going to do it in that time, for that price [£50m].’ We did because we were disciplined.”
Part of the cost may be sourced via branding rights. Roche said: “I really don’t know what the stadium will be called. What I will say is we are going to potentially sell the naming rights to the stadium. Everybody realises affordable accessible ticket prices are really important. To do that, we need to generate revenue streams in other places as well to build the stadium that everyone said is going to be really expensive.”
A sizeable constituency of supporters are concerned regarding more debt being potentially loaded on the club. Roche said: “We’ve got a lot of fans who want to watch the match and can’t, so we need a bigger stadium. In terms of how we then fund it [and any] debt, it’s not about putting debt on the club, if indeed that is the route we go. We’ve got other funding options.
“In and around the matches, people stay for longer. We’ll have all the facilities, other experiences. That’s going to generate a lot more revenue. That’ll go back into the club, the team, growing our football.
“Whilst we can get over-obsessed with debt and borrowing, there is no stadium where you would not have some form of borrowing. I am sure all of you haven’t paid for your houses out of your own pocket. We need to make sure it’s sensible and generates income for the future of the club.”
The proposed design of the stadium drew criticism from those who compared it to a circus tent. Roche stated this could be changed.
“Is it set in stone? No, is the first thing,” she said. “We’re going through the process. We’re not ripping things up so to speak but now we know where it’s going to be, we need to make sure it fits in the right place.
“Does it look right from different angles? We’ve launched a concept of a new stadium and everyone gets excited and then they all decide what the stadium’s going to be, even though I don’t, and I’m running the stadium.”
The stadium plans were unveiled as part of the draft wharfside strategic master plan for the wider area’s development. On 20 July Trafford council’s executive committee will decide whether to approve the master plan. If it does, an eight-week consultation period will start on 28 July.
Roche reiterated the aim is to have the new stadium open by 2035.
