Chelsea Search for a New Stadium

[QPR Report]

Charles Sale/Daily Mail

CHARLES SALE: Chelsea go undercover in search for new ground
Last updated at 12:10 AM on 26th February 2010

Chelsea's search for a new ground, which has been going on since Roman Abramovich bought the club, has intensified to the extent that the investigation into one potential location has been given the code name Operation Snowdrop.

The undercover project refers to the Siemens site next door to BBC headquarters at White City, where Chelsea would have room to build their preferred 60,000-seat stadium if complicated purchases with landowners can be resolved.

Chelsea's options are narrowing following the proposed American Embassy move to Nine Elms near Battersea, which had also been a possibility.

Extending Stamford Bridge will not give the club the capacity they want to compete long-term with Manchester United and Arsenal.

Meanwhile, the Earls Court exhibition centre, another venue Chelsea have examined, is back on the market.


Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-1253876/CHARLES-SALE-Chelsea-undercover-search-new-ground.html#ixzz0gd0H8Xh3

[cpr]

Far too close, stinks of groundshare, don't like it, hope it's bollox, f*ck off chelscum, wrong borough!

[Markqpr]

Feb 26, 2010 8:22:45 GMT QPR Report said:

The undercover project refers to the Siemens site next door to BBC headquarters at White City, where Chelsea would have room to build their preferred 60,000-seat stadium if complicated purchases with landowners can be resolved.

NO F***IN WAY!

F*** RIGHT OFF!

No way am I sharing W12 with that scum.

F*** OFF.

[Lonegunmen]

When and I do mean WHEN, the Russian gets bored or found out and has his assets confiscated, Chelsea will revert to the Chelsea of old and 10,000 crowds.

[ingham]

No doubt many supporters noted the oversupply of millionaires and billionaires at Loftus Road, and wondered whether we had a few who were monitoring the situation at Chelsea and Fulham - and sites around the Borough - rather than harbouring any particular ambitions for QPR.

So there must have been a few who were asking themselves how long before some bright spark suggested the cure for everyone's ills, make good on the claim that QPR were going into the Champions League, pay off Fayed, and prolong the delusion that Chelsea are a big Club, was to fabricate a massive property deal.

Offering a groundshare - the Italian dimension is hardly reassuring - merging QPR and Fulham into a boutique 'brand' in some vast and anonymous stadium designed for World Cups or Olympics, and of real interest only to developers, construction companies, the politicians who hang out with them, and estate agents.

It might explain why everyone is hanging on so grimly and doing so little, especially if they can run up enormous debts and then use the 'plight' of the Clubs to bully the Council into supporting a big development application.

[froggyranger]

Ingham, you are not brightening up my day. I pray you are very wrong with your suspicions, the thought of being in a groundshare with Chelsea makes me feel sick.

Plus the whole of football in the UK seems to be built on a foundation of sand/ like a stack of playing cards. Debt ever increasing and, like all other bubbles, this one will at some stage burst with a lot of casualties. I just hope Rangers aren't affected more than they are now.

Anyway here's hoping for 3 points against Boro. Have a good weekend one and all.

[ingham]

Our frogs send their seasonal greetings from the pond, froggyranger old son. About to spawn soon, I imagine. You too? ;D

The ground threat has been hanging over us for at least 45 years, though, since the appalling wasteland of our sojourn at White City, through Gregory's depredations, Wright's attempts to do the same, and the shabby manoeuvring at Chelsea, Fulham and Brentford.

Follow any new investors at almost any Club. I give them 24 hours to mention the Ground. At LR, I can't think of one who wasn't talking about a new stadium within hours or days of arriving.

Remember the Gold and Sullivan press conference at West Ham. I timed them on the news conference, and it took them about 30 seconds to get to the sale of the Ground.

You don't need much talent, and no footballing talent, to sell off a piece of land for redevelopment. Although they didn't actually SAY they would sell Upton Park, the PR was all about the big stadium the Club is going to, but they can't take Upton Park with them.

And from the description, the Olympic Stadium sounds like a ground the Hammers will never need, one it may never fill, and one it will most likely never own.

When we started watching the Rs, almost every Club owned it own Ground, assets which have appreciated in value rapidly. Now Man City doesn't, Leeds doesn't, Chelsea doesn't, Burnley doesn't, Coventry don't, Oxford United don't, Neither Cambridge Club does, Palace don't, Wimbledon lost theirs and the Club was destroyed, and there are many more with debts which threaten them.

But don't despair. We're still here! And remember, Man Utd would need a ground holding about 7,000,000 to be as relatively big by comparison as AFC Wimbledon were in the Combined Counties league!

Though you may not find that particular comparison reassuring.

[QPR Report]

At least on the hypothetical level, I could maybe accept a new say 25,000 seater stadium just for football, shared with Fulham - and owned by Hammersmith Council... That's something I could debate. Not a merger of the clubs. But a co-owned ground.. (But that of course is more hypothetical)

But what we really have to be careful about is any promise of a new QPR stadium, in which Loftus Road is first sold (although of course it's already morgaged pretty much in effect) and then we're in limbo as promises collapse. FIRST build the new QPR stadium...Then sell Loftus Road

[eskey8]

Feb 26, 2010 12:39:51 GMT QPR Report said:

At least on the hypothetical level, I could maybe accept a new say 25,000 seater stadium just for football, shared with Fulham - and owned by Hammersmith Council... That's something I could debate. Not a merger of the clubs. But a co-owned ground.. (But that of course is more hypothetical)

But what we really have to be careful about is any promise of a new QPR stadium, in which Loftus Road is first sold (although of course it's already morgaged pretty much in effect) and then we're in limbo as promises collapse. FIRST build the new QPR stadium...Then sell Loftus Road

I totally agree Report - I wouldn't be bothered to share a ground, in fact in my eyes it makes more sense to share the cost.

[toboboly]

WHAT?!

If Chelsea turn up in W12 then expect a brick through their window.

[ingham]

The shared ground would soon be sold off on exactly the same basis.

Big talk, and spending carefully calculated to make the Clubs unworkable under its spendthrift regime.

Once they're struggling, the need for a 15,000 capacity ground they'll both share will provide the basis for the Council to offer them a car park somewhere that they can paint the lines on, while the local authority redevelops or sells off the much bigger site they were herded into first time round.

Then the owners would 'save' the Clubs by doing the same thing all over again. Oxford lost their ground, Kingstonian lost theirs, Epsom & Ewell lost theirs, Maidstone United lost theirs, Brighton lost theirs. The only reason for groundsharing is that an investor can sell off the original site to make money for himself.

Everyone makes money by persuading the Clubs that they should lose money, not once, not temporarily, but over and over and over again.

QPR, after all its 'ambition', White City, Loftus Road's redevelopment, and wealthy owners like Gregory, Marler, Thompson, Wright, Caliendo and His mates not to mention this bunch, has a ground the capacity of which has fallen from 35,000 to barely more than half that, and is losing an average of £4 million a season.

All that money goes somewhere. It's the Club's, but the Club never sees it. To strip the Club even of an asset it can call its home is pretty well meaningless to me.

If our home isn't worth having, there's no reason for anyone else to have it. If it is, that's every reason to keep it.

Looking at football clubs in the UK generally - not just confining our gaze to clubs of our size and above - QPR's ground is huge and modern, and at a huge Club.

In the Premier, we count as small, in this division, maybe medium-sized, and in the lower tiers, we might even be thought of as a big Club now, if we're heading back there.

The key to asset-stripping is persuading us we're something we aren't, and that our 'leaders' are many things they are not.

Once we have no home of our own, we'd be even more vulnerable and dependent on any chancer.

I laugh at Arsenal, deceiving themselves they are a business. What 'business' names its headquarters after some OTHER business! Or is Emirates HQ called 'Arsenal'?

Such pride, such independence.

[toboboly]

Ingham. Great post, however K's have a lease from AFC for something like 100 years at a nominal rent so it worked out quite well considering the pit they were put in by the then chairmen, Khosla.

[airport70]

While risking immediate unpopularity, I personally don't see the problem with groundsharing, with anyone, the most important thing is it being in the correct location and being the correct size, I'd hate to be playing in a 60,000 seat stadium with only 14,000 filling it. Thinking purely in practical term, having a stadium that is used every week as opposed to every other week, would probably be able to command smaller operating costs, although the pitch would have to be more robust, maybe we can have that natural, synthetic twist they have at Arsenal. Also it would be good to have our own branding and offices, perhaps on opposite sides of the ground. it would also be ideal that it is co-owned, you don't want be at the mercy of an unfriendly landlord.

[ingham]

Yes, I knew the Dons owned it, but that was my point really, tobololy. I assume the Stones owned it once, but Khosla ensured they lost ownership.

Now they have to pay another Club for the privilege of playing at their own home.

I think shared ownership appeals to supporters in a theoretical way, airport70, but I can't really see how it would work, and why would the people who forced the Clubs out of their previous homes let them own a new one.

Surely the point is to pocket the proceeds themselves.

Shared ownership would make any criteria for attendances, for example, very tricky. If one Club did exceptionally well, and thought it needed a 40,000 stadium, and the other struggled, and needed no more than 15,000, how would that work, given that both would presumably be deadly rivals?

And how would the Clubs' finances work? For the last 30 years they've avoided facing up to their lack of talent and resources by borrowing, initially against the value of the stadium.

So a bankrupt Fulham mortgages its half of the new Loftus Cottage, and a frugal and successful QPR is then obliged to cover all Fulham's costs and make loans to them to meet the mortgage repayments otherwise it will be thrown out into the street when the Lenders foreclose. Aren't lenders - except cowboys - sceptical enough about lending to football clubs as it is?

And don't the Clubs find it hard enough to cope with owning just one stadium? And complicated enough doing one Club's arithmetic, finances, projections? How right have they all been about their wildly overoptimistic estimates for the future? I don't remember them all predicting the Premiership would be over £3 billion in debt - and rising fast - and the two most successful sides of the last few years would be £1.5 billion in debt between them?

While the smaller Clubs - the other 91 really, but say the other 88 - have won nothing big for what? 12 years? More? But they were all going to do better and better and get richer and richer.

Why would we believe them when they tell us anything like that would work?

Did Fulham predict QPR's rise in the sixties? Did QPR predict Fulham's a decade or so ago?

And if we own half a stadium, the principle that the Club should own the stadium is implicit, so what's wrong with owning the whole thing? Surely it would be easier, and far more useful.

That other argument that it should be used all week long for all sorts of things is fine as long as we can play our matches in sweetshops and churches. It's a football stadium. Not a market or a conference centre. I wonder if the rich blokes who are so eager to push football clubs into smaller and smaller spaces with fewer and fewer resources let out the grounds of their mansions and dachas to travellers to ensure that the space isn't simply sitting there doing nothing all week.

The logic of having to earn more and more from the site is a landlord's logic. But the Club's ground is QPR's home. How much money do most of us earn from our homes? Do we let out the roof to airlines to advertise, or the spare bedroom to a promising young rock band specialising in metal, chemistry experiments and satanism (sounds like the QPR boardroom).

It's a matter of preference, but I prefer to take an asset-stripping attitude towards them myself. They want our home so they can use it as they please, not to benefit the Club.

Do Man Utd, Liverpool, Arsenal, Spurs and Villa all groundshare? Their owners might like to force them to do so, to maximise revenue. But maximising revenue didn't make the latter four very successful in the Ferguson era. Any more than Man Utd's superior marketability or glamour made them more successful in the Boot Room era.

I think we've accepted economic arguments for too long without questioning the motives behind them - and especially the economics - and without reminding ourselves that the people concerned - I don't mean supporters, I mean 'investors - know nothing about football, and have never achieved footballing success.

Great posts, people. A treat to read!

[Lonegunmen]

Take note Flavio & Gianni and who-ever else at Loftus Road. The Wellington Phoenix ground share with the Wellington Hurricanes and Cricket and concerts. On 7th march we will be playing the newcastle Jets in the A League. The groiund that holds 34,500 us sold out and punters had a choice of two tickets. $35 or $50 NZD tickets. Amazuing considering the club has only been going for 3 seasons.

No pretentions, just keeping the seating prices realistic. Packed stadium. I suggest that QPR immediately cnages their rpicing structures and get back into the real world.