Cod Almighty | Diary

Paint the floodlight stanchions and will they come?

29 December 2016

Devon Diary writes: Did any of you see Gregor Robertson's interview with Omar Bogle, which covered Bogle's journey from rejection to rebuilding his career at Town, and the strong possibility he might be the next Jamie Vardy? By all accounts it was a great read, as are all of Robertson's articles. But unfortunately, as it's stuck behind the Times' paywall, I can't tell you more about it, so fuck you Rupert Murdoch.

What I did manage to read was the piece in the Telegraph about how the boss of Extreme Leisure is confident that Town's new stadium will go ahead. Alistair Gosling isn't a massive football fan but based on their experience of the Xscape Centre in Milton Keynes, a water park in Northumberland and Swindon leisure centre, he's pretty confident in the scheme.

You can tell Alistair is not a massive football fan because he references Leicester City's King Power stadium as an example of a new ground being a springboard for success. No, if Gosling were a fan or had even a passing interest in the football he would know that the costs of building the Walkers/City of Leicester Stadium was a contributing factor to the club going into receivership not long after they moved in.

The Foxes were big enough to soak up the points deduction, and it was also a little easier for clubs then to wipe out debt and shaft all their smaller creditors before continuing exactly as before but without the financial pressures. At the same time as Leicester hit the buffers, Darlington also went into administration after building a new stadium. Now look at Coventry and the Ricoh Arena.

Not all clubs moving to new stadia run into serious trouble, of course. Arsenal managed it, although the financial pressure of servicing the debt of building the Emirates has left Arsenal struggling to compete in the transfer market and the Premier League wages arms war. Even new stadiums that have no cost attached don't always work out, do they West Ham?

I worry about Town and the new stadium. I worry about the location and how that will impact the all-week revenues that the bars and other concessions are expected to bring in. More than anything I worry about the costs of a 14,000-seater stadium and how Town might service them at current levels of attendance. Where are the extra bums on seats coming from? What will double our fanbase? That's the question that none of the articles and utterances from Fenty (or Gosling) have addressed.

Do we have thousands of fans sitting at home musing about how they'd turn up on a Saturday if only they could tie it in with a spot of ice skating? If only the floodlight stanchions had been painted recently, then we'd turn up! This is what I worry about. If these lapsed fans don't exist and aren't waiting for a shiny new seat in a shiny new stadium then we will be Doncaster Rovers playing in front of 75 per cent empty terraces and with a debt which would make Greece flinch.

It's going to take more than flogging a Bogle every year or so to fix that.