The stadium of a legendary club will be destroyed, its owner has confirmed the wish to create a new one with a disproportionate investment.
The Parc des Princes, Stade Vélodrome, Camp Nou, San Siro, Santiago Bernabeu, Twickenham, Murrayfield … Clubs and nations are often associated with legendary stadiums. The stadium is very often the soul of a club, when it does not access the temple status of its discipline. For rugby, Twickenham is one of those real places of pilgrimage to rugby for example. A very strong identity that several stadiums in the world have the chance to have.
But maintaining a dearly cost stadium is a permanent interview that is not necessarily always easy for clubs, who need many investors. This is why stadiums now have “naming” which, it must be said, can sometimes spoil the pleasure: Orange Vélodrome in Marseille, Aviva Stadium in Ireland etc …
In England, a legendary club plans to change stadium and not least: Manchester United and its Old Trafford. Built in 1909, it underwent a first big renovation in 2006 with an increase of 8000 seats and mainly became one of the first football stadiums to meet the ISO 20121 standard: “Responsible management systems applied to event activity – requirements and recommendations for implementation”.
But now, the owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe wants to change everything and sees things big, as he explained in an interview for the Times. “If you consider that it is the largest club in the world, then it must be a stadium worthy of the biggest club in the world and also a stadium worthy of the largest league in the world,” he said.
For him, the construction of this new stadium must be integrated into a more global “government plan for the southern Manchester”. “We cannot afford to redevelop the south of Manchester, it is an overly high invoice for the club. We can build a stadium. We do not need government funding, but it must be the basis of revitalization,” also explained the richest man in England.
The cost of building this new stadium could be pharaminous because we are talking about an investment of 2.4 billion euros for the moment to build this new Old Trafford which has been in pipes for many years now … Manchester United’s intention is to open this “New Trafford” in 2031.