As the extended North Stand, entertainment area and hotel are following on from the construction of the arena, I think it likely that the collar site will follow when the renovated stand and ancillary developments are completed. IMO, the arena is the game-changer we've been waiting for and it unlocks the development potential of the rest of the Etihad Campus site.
@Gone for a Burton is a relatively new poster, but from what I've seen of his posts he's a long-standing Blue who's now based in the UAE (apologies if I have any of that wrong). Everything that featured in the club's announcement about extending the stand and the other associated works bears out stuff that he's posted in the last four months on the Etihad Campus thread with regard to how things will go.
He also posted
the following on 12 November:
Now, so far there's been no mention of a casino or conferencing with regard to the hotel, so I assume that's what's going to follow after the phase that's just been announced. Conferencing, conventions and similar events represent the most realistic way to drive up the numbers of visitors to the site daily. For instance, the Excel Centre in London claims to welcome an annual
"40,000 exhibiting companies and over 4 million people ... from across the globe". The Etihad is already a significant conference venue building on that offers great potential.
Then you look at what you can put on the site for people who come to stay in the hotels and go to a match or a concert, or who attend a conference - the aim being to offer everything they need on site so that they stay and spend all their money at the Campus and don't have to head to town for leisure options. A casino is one of those options, but if big enough might also attract people from the north of England specifically to visit that facility. Obviously, it won't dominate the development as the original Super Casino would have, but it will be part of an attractive offer.
Back in the day, I used to have two contacts who fed me information about how plans were moving for the Collar Site. One was a professional adviser who dealt with the club and the other was actually associated with the club at the time. Both have long since moved on and can no longer provide the snippets they used to, but at the time the information was, I believe, of high quality. For instance, I posted about an arena on the northern part of the development site before anyone else did - it was years in the planning before it was announced.
I was told long ago that conferencing had been identified as a key driver of an increase in the number of visitors to the Campus, so am awaiting proposals along these lines with great interest. And a casino was mooted as part of the proposals as far back as 2009 - see the posts by
@fbloke here and
here. At the time, both fbloke and I didn't believe that our owners would countenance a casino, but it's easy to see why things might have changed.
I understand that the intention originally was to accommodate a visitor attraction that would be aimed at kids and would be technology-based, and a gambling venue didn't fit with this wholesome vision. However, the talk since then has been that, on account of the wider state of the economy, no suitable partner has come forward with a willingness to invest in and operate such an attraction. For this reason, I think we're looking at something along the lines of
Resorts World Birmingham.
Some people might not regard this as particularly exciting. However, it's a concept that works. Next to the NEC and the NEC Arena, the complex includes a large casino (
60,000 square feet of gaming space, one of the biggest in the UK), retail, a multiplex cinema, a hotel and a dedicated conference centre. We have 37 acres on the collar site, so there's plenty of space to create a mixed-use destination along these lines that will pull visitors in from all over the country and more widely.
Part of this vision is confirmed by the 2019 update of the Eastlands Regeneration Framework (ERF), which can be downloaded
here and which first mooted the new arena. It then referred (see page 45) to "other facilities including a multiplex cinema, an expanded food and beverage offer, and hotel development [which] are seen by investors and operators as being potentially viable propositions given the changing and growing market for entertainment activities".
Finally, the ERF suggests office space will be part of the plans as well. The ERF (again, see page 45) refers to "the opportunity for sports-based businesses to locate" to the Campus and to having a strategy that "establishes the Etihad Campus as a centre of national and international significance for sports and entertainment related businesses and organisations". The RFL is here already, as are British Cycling and England Squash among others. More will join them.
We've had a lot of false starts in terms of this development, and we'd have been mortified when we first started talking about this if we'd known that we'd be here 14 years later with the Collar Site still undeveloped. But as I 've said above, I really think that Co-op Live is a game-changer in terms of developing the Campus.
The above may not be as exciting as some of the more extravagant ideas we trailed back in the day (I for one lament the absence of cheetah racing and the giant log flume!). But I used to make a living negotiating and drafting contractual documentation for very high-value real estate projects, some for entertainment complexes like this will be. I genuinely believe that we're seeing a sustainable vision for the site's future gradually taking shape.
And I'm excited by that. In terms of what MCC has promised in official documents going back to at least 2012, it fits the bill. It will be a 24-hour destination (I foresee a night-time Metrolink service from Etihad Campus to Salford Quays via the city centre), while it will draw in visitors from all over the UK and internationally, given that there'll be hotel packages centred around gigs and football. Bring it on!
