When global investors and developers gathered on the French Riviera a fortnight ago for the MIPIM property trade show, there was no shortage of hyperbole about Manchester United’s plans for a new £2bn stadium.
The proposed replacement by one of the world’s most famous football clubs of its Old Trafford ground could trigger more regeneration than the 2012 Olympic Games, former London Olympics chief Lord Sebastian Coe said from the stage, making it “the biggest thing undertaken” in Europe.
Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham told the Financial Times he was expecting more than £200mn in UK government transport investment to allow the stadium to be built and unlock a local growth scheme “that knocks everything else into the shade”.
The pitch in Cannes was part of a concerted lobbying operation for funding in the government’s June spending review.
The Premier League club and its high-profile backers envisage 17,000 new homes around a towering 100,000-seater, Norman Foster-designed stadium. Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who had already backed the project publicly, is now eyeing the so-called “New Trafford” as one of her big bets on boosting growth outside London.
However, there remain unanswered questions about the proposals.
Among the most significant is the £2bn the club needs to raise in order to replace its historic but decrepit 74,000-seater Old Trafford ground, to the west of Manchester city centre.
In Cannes, United’s chief operating officer Collette Roche insisted there had been significant interest in investing in the new stadium.
“We’re having lots of conversations around where we can get different revenue streams from, really positive conversations, . . . we believe it does stack up,” she told the Financial Times.
Andy Green, finance spokesman at Manchester United Supporters Trust and head of investment at private equity firm Rockpool Investments, welcomed the proposal, but said financing is where it “gets really complicated”.
“They’ve got £731mn of debt, plus £291mn owed to other clubs,” he said of United. “That’s secured on absolutely everything, so they can only borrow more by refinancing what they’ve got.”
The club is therefore starting from “quite a bad position” compared with Tottenham Hotspur, he said, which borrowed to build its £1.2bn new ground after starting with no debt at all. Spurs also borrowed when interest rates were far lower, and have since said they would be unable to repeat the project, completed in 2019, in the current investment climate.
Naming rights for the new stadium would certainly help raise cash, said Green, while profits from property redevelopment in the surrounding area could theoretically make it easier to borrow substantial amounts.
Nevertheless those potential property gains remain “completely unclear”, he said.
Key to the ambitious stadium design — a vast tent-like structure with three masts — is the relocation of the rail company Freightliner next door.
The freight group occupies land to the west of the current Old Trafford stadium, on to which the club now wants to expand. Three people familiar with the proposals said United could build a stadium without moving on to that site, but it would be more difficult and not as eye-catching as the version currently proposed.
Burnham and the club’s pitch for more than £200mn in government money would fund moving Freightliner 25 miles away to the proposed ILP North logistics hub in St Helen’s, Merseyside.
The move would not only make room for the new stadium, they argue, but also take freight trains out of Manchester’s congested Castlefield corridor — where they currently mingle with long-distance, regional and commuter services in one of the country’s worst rail bottlenecks — by rerouting them on to the West Coast Mainline.
This would have the same benefits as a scrapped proposal to build extra rail capacity through central Manchester, said Burnham.
“This is a fifth, a quarter of the cost of the other plan for relieving congestion in Manchester city centre,” he said, referring to proposals that had included two new platforms at Piccadilly Station. “The uplift in capacity is — I’m told — as good as building platforms 15 and 16.”
Six rail experts and transport officials told the Financial Times that rerouting freight traffic would indeed free up some space through Castlefield.
But none of them agreed that it would be the equivalent of the original upgrades, unveiled in 2014 by then-chancellor George Osborne.
“No chance,” said timetabling expert William Barter, who worked on HS2 before he retired. “You can’t argue taking one freight train an hour away does the same as a whole extra pair of tracks.”
It is also unclear how the extra freight would affect the busy West Coast Mainline, which links London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. Plans to increase capacity on the line vanished with the scrapping of the northern leg of the HS2 rail project by the previous government.
Two officials separately summed up attempts to move freight around an underinvested rail system as “whack a mole”.
As well as the funding for United’s new stadium and surrounding regeneration, the timeframe remains in question.
While Roche said in Cannes that the ground would be built within five to six years using a modular construction process, the planning process and public inquiry required for the new freight hub in St Helen’s is expected to take until 2029.
A United source said the stadium build could begin prior to Freightliner’s full relocation, however, through the use of a “short-term land swap”.
Despite no public funding being sought for the ground itself, critics still believe the optics of the government assisting a club owned by Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the billionaire founder of chemicals group Ineos who is resident in Monaco for tax purposes, are toxic in the current climate.
“It is intolerable that public money, at a time of cuts in welfare spending, should be used to help a tax exile,” said Manchester Labour MP Graham Stringer, a United fan who as council leader helped secure the Commonwealth Games for the city in 2002. United’s rivals Manchester City moved into the Games’ venue a year after the event.
Speaking to the FT in Cannes, Coe — a member of the task force drawing up regeneration plans around Old Trafford — insisted the plan would be economically transformational, arguing that it would be the first football-led growth project of its kind.
“With all due respect to lots of the stadiums that have been built in the UK, they’re just stadiums,” he said, referencing Arsenal’s Emirates and Tottenham’s new ground.
The plans for Old Trafford are far more ambitious, Coe said. The club claims 92,000 jobs could be created by the project, more than twice as many as those who work at the adjacent Trafford Park industrial hub.
Coe said he had spoken directly with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer about the plans and had “very good, supportive observations” from Reeves’ office.
“There really does have to be a recognition that the multiplier effect off the back of this stadium is profound.”
