The majority of Manchester United fans favour a brand new stadium being built on the Old Trafford site over a redevelopment of the existing venue.
Since March, the Old Trafford Regeneration Task Force, which includes Gary Neville, Sebastian Coe and Manchester major Andy Burnham, has explored options. The creation of the taskforce effectively ruled out leaving the Old Trafford site altogether, narrowing the choices.
With new co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe keen on delivering a world class ‘Wembley of the north’ as part of a wider regeneration of the local area, the club has share survey results from more than 50,000 season ticket holders, members and executive club members to gauge opinions from supporters.
It is the highest engagement rate of any fan research ever conducted by the club.
The survey addressed current matchday experience and what fans want their future experience to look like, as well as views on going down the path of new build or redevelopment.
United have confirmed that more than 90% of the fans who responded are positive about the overall ambition of the club to “deliver a world class stadium at the heart of a regenerated stadium district”.
Just over half, 52%, said their preference is a brand new stadium being built. Redevelopment of the existing Old Trafford stadium garnered support from 31%, while 17% of responders are undecided.
The strongest support for a new stadium is from current season ticket holders, the people who are most regularly in attendance at Old Trafford as it sits. More surprisingly, it is older fans who are leaning more towards a building a new home from the ground up, with younger supporters more behind redevelopment.
Part of the longstanding issues with redevelopment has been the cost and engineering nightmare that comes with trying to build up the Sir Bobby Charlton Stand along the south of the stadium, which runs parallel to a railway line. Old Trafford is also wedged in by a canal on the other side, but the club has vast car parks adjacent to the north that could be repurposed for a new stadium.
The obvious downside of bulldozing the current Old Trafford to build a new one 100 or so metres away is the attachment to 114 years of history. That being said, the only surviving part of the original stadium built in 1910 is the halfway line tunnel that hasn’t been used on matchday since 1993. United do, however, intend to create a heritage group to ensure that various historically important aspects of the stadium would be preserved in the event of demolition and rebuilding.
The option of building a new stadium and keeping a reduced capacity version of the original Old Trafford for the club’s women and academy teams was reported to be unlikely almost as soon as it was mooted, with the cost of that transformation alone like to spin into the hundreds of millions.
Whether it will be a new or redeveloped stadium, United ultimately want Old Trafford to be an entertainment hub in a wider area that would also include new housing stock, a commercial district, mixed use zones and new transport links. There could be 92,000 new jobs created, 17,000 new homes, 1.8m visitors per year and estimated worth to the UK economy of £7.3bn.
Old Trafford could be a 100,000 capacity venue, making it the biggest stadium in the country ahead of Wembley, and rivalling Barcelona’s Camp Nou abroad. Previous updates from the club have teased what it could look like once the regeneration project is complete.
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