Carlisle United’s team would suffer if the club opted to renovate Brunton Park instead of build a new stadium, Andrew Jenkins has claimed.
The Blues’ long-serving chairman and joint owner said the huge £18 million cost of making United’s current ground fit for the Championship would have a damaging effect on the manager’s transfer budget.Jenkins admitted leaving 102-year-old Brunton Park would be a “wrench” but claimed the new project, to build a 12,000-seater ground at Kingmoor through enabling development, was the only way forward.
“If we didn’t move, we would have to spend money on the existing stadium,” Jenkins said. “That would probably mean starving the playing side of the club.”
Managing director John Nixon, meanwhile, said the planned 12,000 capacity was the right size for United’s proposed new ground.
The design of the stadium would allow for it to be expanded if required, but Nixon said: “Our average attendances over the last two years are 5,200 so you have to realistic.
“It would be nice to get 8-9000, even 10,000, in the Championship. That’s probably what Carlisle as a city with 100,000 people is capable of supporting.
“That’s a 10 per cent return from the city. A city like Newcastle, with a million people only get a four per cent return with 40,000 crowds.
“So we do quite well and we’ve got to be realistic about the numbers and returns you’d get. Cumbria itself has only got 500,000 people in it.
“It isn’t a silly number. We thought 10,000 was too small but 12 is about right.”
Nixon also insisted United would have control over the design, specification and building of the new ground to ensure it met the club’s requirements.
“Having been to hundreds of grounds over the years we do know what we want out of them,” said the MD, who said the plans include indoor and outdoor training facilities which could be used by the local community.
“We want to make it very efficient stadium so if it wasn’t full we could close parts off and wouldn’t need to steward them.
“We are looking after the club, the fans and the future. The developer [Kingmoor] will look after the finance, the development partners and whatever goes with that, be it housing, commercial or retail. We don’t want to get involved in that. You’ve got to let the two do their own thing.”
Nixon said he was optimistic that the new stadium would not lead to traffic problems in and around the city.
“A lot of people around Warwick Road that will not be too unhappy we’re moving away, because of the traffic problems we cause every odd Saturday and some evenings,” he said.
“We’re going to have a little bit more difficulty getting people up and down but we would hope to have transport arrangement to ensure people could do that.
“There’s also the positive side that if away fans are visiting, they don’t come through the city centre, they come off at a motorway junction and come straight into the ground and straight away from the ground.
“There are positives and negatives but if we end up at the northern end of the town, the Carlisle Northern Development Route is just about to open and that connects it nicely with the west coast as well. Lots of things are going for it.
“And with hotels within the area being panned, it gives us a better overall offer to other clubs. A lot of visiting clubs can’t stay in Carlisle because we don’t have a really good four-star hotel. So they stay at Penrith or even Lancaster, which is awful. We’ve got to be the same as other cities.”
Nixon said a new ground would massively improve the Saturday afternoon experience for home supporters, at a time when football on TV was posing a big threat to live football audiences.
“Football is on TV every night and people don’t need to come to a stadium to watch football. We have to provide them with the best facilities to make that experience of coming to a live football game that much better.”
Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk
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