Andy Burnham | Manchester Mayor

Onholiday(somemightsay) said:
Top man @petrusha - please can you tag us in the post so I can have a gooseys at the numbers once available.

This has taken on even more importance now the ball is starting to roll on this one............
Click to expand...
OK, as requested.

So, going back to what City have paid for the stadium. The facts used to be online at the Sport England website, but no longer are. Fortunately, at the time we moved, I used to write articles for a City fan site. They're no longer available but I retained my notes from one I wrote about the stadium. The terms on which we moved and other salient facts are as follows:
  1. Of the original GBP 110 million cost of the stadium, including the planned conversion to a football stadium, GBP 77 million was to be funded by Sports England grants from lottery funds and GBP 33 million was to be funded by Manchester City Council.
  2. Owing to cost overruns on the project, Sport England subsequently provided another GBP 20 million in grants.
  3. The cost of constructing a temporary stadium for the 2002 Games with a capacity of around 30K that would have been scaled back to an athletics venue of 8K to 10K would have been in the region of GBP 60 million.
  4. Though City agreed in principle in September 1998 to take a long-term lease of a permanent stadium appropriately converted for football, a binding contract to that effect wasn't signed until August 1999 - and Gary James has suggested that the deal may well never have been signed off on the Council/Sport England side had we not been promoted from the third tier around 10 weeks previously.
  5. As part of the deal, City agreed to make parts of the stadium available for community use on 100 days each year. I don't know what happens in practice, but this is the contractual commitment.
  6. City agreed to reimburse the Council's GBP 33 million paid towards construction in return for being granted a managing lease, under which we'd retain all money from additional use of the stadium for concerts, other sporting events and the like. We could, as happened with West Ham at Stratford, have done a deal whereby we'd have been a priority tenant, paid nothing towards the construction of the venue in the form we were to move into, and the Council would have reaped all the benefit from other use.
  7. This GBP 33 million was funded by way of a GBP 6 million cash payment and by the transfer of Maine Road (valued at GBP 27 million) into the Council's ownership.
  8. The value of Maine Road was somewhat controversial. Accountant Paul Stanley, a partner at Begbies Traynor who used to review City's accounts in the 1990s for the King of the Kippax fanzine under the alias 'Stan the Man' once called this "the most dubious accounting valuation I've ever come across", and he didn't mean it was undervalued.
  9. The Council's original intention was to lease out Maine Road as a sports venue, with Sale Sharks and Stockport County (seriously!) putting themselves forward for preferred bidder status. Sale won that battle but ultimately bottled out of taking their posh fans to Moss Side, so the site was sold for housing. It was reported at the time, based on information gained pursuant to an FoI request, that the Council received approximately GBP 14 million from the developer.
  10. In addition, we were to pay rent based on a percentage of the take from attendances in excess of the capacity at Maine Road when the lease was signed: 40% of net revenue from spectators between 34.5K and 41K, and 60% of net revenue generated by spectators in excess of 41K.
  11. This money was ringfenced and couldn't be used towards the Council's ordinary budgetary requirements. It was applied towards the upkeep of sporting facilities, including those on what was then referred to as the Sport City site around the stadium, which the Council claimed in the mid-2000s to attract 3 million visitors per annum outside MCFC home games (this seems a dubious figure, but it's what they claimed).
  12. In 2011, before the Etihad naming deal was signed, the Manchester Evening News claimed that MCFC had paid the Council GBP 14 million in rent over the first eight years of occupancy at the new stadium. I think from memory that this figure came from an FoI
  13. In 2011, the lease was amended by agreement between the parties to reflect City's possible desire to expand the stadium as well as to grant the club the right to sell naming rights for the stadium, which the lease hadn't previously allow. In return, the club agreed (according to David Conn reporting in The Guardian) to pay the Council GBP 3 million per annum in rent and a further GBP 1 million annually for the right to dispose of naming rights.
  14. @Gordyiola has produced information from an FoI request suggesting that the figure, at least before the South Stand was expanded in 2015, the rental figure was higher than that reported by Conn. I'm going to stick to GBP 4 million in my calculations just because it's an easy, round figure.
We can see from the above that the Council has thus, as at the summer of 2025, will have received the following from the club with regard to the stadium:

(i) GBP 6 million as our cash contribution to the construction costs for the stadium; (ii) GBP 14 million realised from the asset (Maine Road) that we transferred at the same time; (iii) GBP 14 million in rent from August 2003 to summer 2011 (inclusive); and (iv) an estimated GBP 56 million in rent and compensation for the disposal of naming rights from August 2011 to August 2021 (inclusive).

Thus, in contrast to what our detractors say when they maintain we received the stadium for nothing, we reach a figure in the ballpark of GBP 90 million paid up to the summer of 2025. If this number is slightly out, then it won't be by very much at all.

Other points worth noting:
  1. As has been noted on many occasions before, though United did enter negotiations to use a larger stadium on the Commonwealth site that was eventually built, by 1999 City were decisively the only show in town, as point 4 above suggests. Had this stadium not been built for City, the Games would have been held in a 30,000-seater temporary venue then (as at Victoria, Canada in 1994) scaled back to a much smaller athletics stadium of 10,000 seats or less. Sport England put the cost of that option at GBP 60 million but the resultant venue would have had almost zero potential as the catalyst for major regeneration in East Manchester.
  2. By building a stadium that City could use as opposed to one where the sole Commonwealth Games legacy at the site would be a small athletics stadium, Sport England estimated that the Council had incurred an additional GBP 70 million of costs. Thus, the public purse has received far more than just its money back on the amount attributable to creating a new stadium fit for MCFC's use and stands to generate a further GBP 4 million annually for years to come, until MCFC is in a position to exercise the option it has to buy out the freehold under the lease.
  3. Further, there's been over 20 years of community use of the stadium, but we should also note that an arrangement is in force under which the rent paid to MCC by MCFC for use of the stadium is ring-fenced for sporting use, so can't be applied by MCC towards meeting its general budgetary needs. This was a stipulation in the original conditions for the grant by Sport England of funding to allow the stadium to be built for the Commonwealth Games and then leased to us afterwards.
  4. The above arrangement has allowed MCC to maintain the other sporting facilities around the stadium when other local authorities, in this long era of austerity and cost-cutting, have sought to save cash by closing similar facilities. A great example is Sheffield, where the 25,000-seater Don Valley athletics stadium and Ponds Forge international-standard swimming pool have been demolished as the local council there couldn't afford to fund their upkeep

TL, DR - The Council and Sport England have received fucking fantastic benefits from building a stadium for City to move into once the Commonwealth Games were over, even if you say nothing about the additional benefits for and investment in East Manchester brought by the owners attracted to the club in 2008. I haven't even started on that.
 
jrb said:
Everyone on here knows how long a stadium takes to design and build, never mind buying the land to build it on. It took Spurs 3 years to build their new stadium. It took many more years of design, planning, and funding before the build. Spurs stadium is 62,000 capacity. United want a 100,000 capacity. It took 5 years to build Wembley. All the other proposals surrounding the new Old Trafford will take decades to be build. I’ll be dead by then. :-)
Click to expand...

Ratcliffe no spring chicken isn't he 74
 
jrb said:
Do you know what the initial cost of the London Olympics was? What the final cost was? What transforming the Olympic stadium to West Ham's stadium cost. The lease deal West Ham negotiated on the stadium? Google all that. It's an absolute eye opener. The Olympic Games was supposed to benefit the whole country financially and with jobs. Spin offs.. Did it? No it didn't. The actual games were a success. I'll admit that. Just like the 2002 Manchester Commonwealth Games were.

That's the same line Burnham and United are spinning about the new Wembley of the North.
Click to expand...
I can see why Citizen of Legoland might put you on ignore. I know about the WHU deal, that's why I asked the question.
 
Just a thought.
The rags don't want (can't afford) a new stadium.
The Labour Council and Government can't afford the regeneration project.

But hell, both are getting huge publicity from a project that will never happen but can be milked for years by them.
 
petrusha said:
OK, as requested.

So, going back to what City have paid for the stadium. The facts used to be online at the Sport England website, but no longer are. Fortunately, at the time we moved, I used to write articles for a City fan site. They're no longer available but I retained my notes from one I wrote about the stadium. The terms on which we moved and other salient facts are as follows:
  1. Of the original GBP 110 million cost of the stadium, including the planned conversion to a football stadium, GBP 77 million was to be funded by Sports England grants from lottery funds and GBP 33 million was to be funded by Manchester City Council.
  2. Owing to cost overruns on the project, Sport England subsequently provided another GBP 20 million in grants.
  3. The cost of constructing a temporary stadium for the 2002 Games with a capacity of around 30K that would have been scaled back to an athletics venue of 8K to 10K would have been in the region of GBP 60 million.
  4. Though City agreed in principle in September 1998 to take a long-term lease of a permanent stadium appropriately converted for football, a binding contract to that effect wasn't signed until August 1999 - and Gary James has suggested that the deal may well never have been signed off on the Council/Sport England side had we not been promoted from the third tier around 10 weeks previously.
  5. As part of the deal, City agreed to make parts of the stadium available for community use on 100 days each year. I don't know what happens in practice, but this is the contractual commitment.
  6. City agreed to reimburse the Council's GBP 33 million paid towards construction in return for being granted a managing lease, under which we'd retain all money from additional use of the stadium for concerts, other sporting events and the like. We could, as happened with West Ham at Stratford, have done a deal whereby we'd have been a priority tenant, paid nothing towards the construction of the venue in the form we were to move into, and the Council would have reaped all the benefit from other use.
  7. This GBP 33 million was funded by way of a GBP 6 million cash payment and by the transfer of Maine Road (valued at GBP 27 million) into the Council's ownership.
  8. The value of Maine Road was somewhat controversial. Accountant Paul Stanley, a partner at Begbies Traynor who used to review City's accounts in the 1990s for the King of the Kippax fanzine under the alias 'Stan the Man' once called this "the most dubious accounting valuation I've ever come across", and he didn't mean it was undervalued.
  9. The Council's original intention was to lease out Maine Road as a sports venue, with Sale Sharks and Stockport County (seriously!) putting themselves forward for preferred bidder status. Sale won that battle but ultimately bottled out of taking their posh fans to Moss Side, so the site was sold for housing. It was reported at the time, based on information gained pursuant to an FoI request, that the Council received approximately GBP 14 million from the developer.
  10. In addition, we were to pay rent based on a percentage of the take from attendances in excess of the capacity at Maine Road when the lease was signed: 40% of net revenue from spectators between 34.5K and 41K, and 60% of net revenue generated by spectators in excess of 41K.
  11. This money was ringfenced and couldn't be used towards the Council's ordinary budgetary requirements. It was applied towards the upkeep of sporting facilities, including those on what was then referred to as the Sport City site around the stadium, which the Council claimed in the mid-2000s to attract 3 million visitors per annum outside MCFC home games (this seems a dubious figure, but it's what they claimed).
  12. In 2011, before the Etihad naming deal was signed, the Manchester Evening News claimed that MCFC had paid the Council GBP 14 million in rent over the first eight years of occupancy at the new stadium. I think from memory that this figure came from an FoI
  13. In 2011, the lease was amended by agreement between the parties to reflect City's possible desire to expand the stadium as well as to grant the club the right to sell naming rights for the stadium, which the lease hadn't previously allow. In return, the club agreed (according to David Conn reporting in The Guardian) to pay the Council GBP 3 million per annum in rent and a further GBP 1 million annually for the right to dispose of naming rights.
  14. @Gordyiola has produced information from an FoI request suggesting that the figure, at least before the South Stand was expanded in 2015, the rental figure was higher than that reported by Conn. I'm going to stick to GBP 4 million in my calculations just because it's an easy, round figure.
We can see from the above that the Council has thus, as at the summer of 2025, will have received the following from the club with regard to the stadium:

(i) GBP 6 million as our cash contribution to the construction costs for the stadium; (ii) GBP 14 million realised from the asset (Maine Road) that we transferred at the same time; (iii) GBP 14 million in rent from August 2003 to summer 2011 (inclusive); and (iv) an estimated GBP 56 million in rent and compensation for the disposal of naming rights from August 2011 to August 2021 (inclusive).

Thus, in contrast to what our detractors say when they maintain we received the stadium for nothing, we reach a figure in the ballpark of GBP 90 million paid up to the summer of 2025. If this number is slightly out, then it won't be by very much at all.

Other points worth noting:
  1. As has been noted on many occasions before, though United did enter negotiations to use a larger stadium on the Commonwealth site that was eventually built, by 1999 City were decisively the only show in town, as point 4 above suggests. Had this stadium not been built for City, the Games would have been held in a 30,000-seater temporary venue then (as at Victoria, Canada in 1994) scaled back to a much smaller athletics stadium of 10,000 seats or less. Sport England put the cost of that option at GBP 60 million but the resultant venue would have had almost zero potential as the catalyst for major regeneration in East Manchester.
  2. By building a stadium that City could use as opposed to one where the sole Commonwealth Games legacy at the site would be a small athletics stadium, Sport England estimated that the Council had incurred an additional GBP 70 million of costs. Thus, the public purse has received far more than just its money back on the amount attributable to creating a new stadium fit for MCFC's use and stands to generate a further GBP 4 million annually for years to come, until MCFC is in a position to exercise the option it has to buy out the freehold under the lease.
  3. Further, there's been over 20 years of community use of the stadium, but we should also note that an arrangement is in force under which the rent paid to MCC by MCFC for use of the stadium is ring-fenced for sporting use, so can't be applied by MCC towards meeting its general budgetary needs. This was a stipulation in the original conditions for the grant by Sport England of funding to allow the stadium to be built for the Commonwealth Games and then leased to us afterwards.
  4. The above arrangement has allowed MCC to maintain the other sporting facilities around the stadium when other local authorities, in this long era of austerity and cost-cutting, have sought to save cash by closing similar facilities. A great example is Sheffield, where the 25,000-seater Don Valley athletics stadium and Ponds Forge international-standard swimming pool have been demolished as the local council there couldn't afford to fund their upkeep

TL, DR - The Council and Sport England have received fucking fantastic benefits from building a stadium for City to move into once the Commonwealth Games were over, even if you say nothing about the additional benefits for and investment in East Manchester brought by the owners attracted to the club in 2008. I haven't even started on that.
Click to expand...
Excellent post

Andy Burnham can fuck right off
 
petrusha said:
OK, as requested.

So, going back to what City have paid for the stadium. The facts used to be online at the Sport England website, but no longer are. Fortunately, at the time we moved, I used to write articles for a City fan site. They're no longer available but I retained my notes from one I wrote about the stadium. The terms on which we moved and other salient facts are as follows:
  1. Of the original GBP 110 million cost of the stadium, including the planned conversion to a football stadium, GBP 77 million was to be funded by Sports England grants from lottery funds and GBP 33 million was to be funded by Manchester City Council.
  2. Owing to cost overruns on the project, Sport England subsequently provided another GBP 20 million in grants.
  3. The cost of constructing a temporary stadium for the 2002 Games with a capacity of around 30K that would have been scaled back to an athletics venue of 8K to 10K would have been in the region of GBP 60 million.
  4. Though City agreed in principle in September 1998 to take a long-term lease of a permanent stadium appropriately converted for football, a binding contract to that effect wasn't signed until August 1999 - and Gary James has suggested that the deal may well never have been signed off on the Council/Sport England side had we not been promoted from the third tier around 10 weeks previously.
  5. As part of the deal, City agreed to make parts of the stadium available for community use on 100 days each year. I don't know what happens in practice, but this is the contractual commitment.
  6. City agreed to reimburse the Council's GBP 33 million paid towards construction in return for being granted a managing lease, under which we'd retain all money from additional use of the stadium for concerts, other sporting events and the like. We could, as happened with West Ham at Stratford, have done a deal whereby we'd have been a priority tenant, paid nothing towards the construction of the venue in the form we were to move into, and the Council would have reaped all the benefit from other use.
  7. This GBP 33 million was funded by way of a GBP 6 million cash payment and by the transfer of Maine Road (valued at GBP 27 million) into the Council's ownership.
  8. The value of Maine Road was somewhat controversial. Accountant Paul Stanley, a partner at Begbies Traynor who used to review City's accounts in the 1990s for the King of the Kippax fanzine under the alias 'Stan the Man' once called this "the most dubious accounting valuation I've ever come across", and he didn't mean it was undervalued.
  9. The Council's original intention was to lease out Maine Road as a sports venue, with Sale Sharks and Stockport County (seriously!) putting themselves forward for preferred bidder status. Sale won that battle but ultimately bottled out of taking their posh fans to Moss Side, so the site was sold for housing. It was reported at the time, based on information gained pursuant to an FoI request, that the Council received approximately GBP 14 million from the developer.
  10. In addition, we were to pay rent based on a percentage of the take from attendances in excess of the capacity at Maine Road when the lease was signed: 40% of net revenue from spectators between 34.5K and 41K, and 60% of net revenue generated by spectators in excess of 41K.
  11. This money was ringfenced and couldn't be used towards the Council's ordinary budgetary requirements. It was applied towards the upkeep of sporting facilities, including those on what was then referred to as the Sport City site around the stadium, which the Council claimed in the mid-2000s to attract 3 million visitors per annum outside MCFC home games (this seems a dubious figure, but it's what they claimed).
  12. In 2011, before the Etihad naming deal was signed, the Manchester Evening News claimed that MCFC had paid the Council GBP 14 million in rent over the first eight years of occupancy at the new stadium. I think from memory that this figure came from an FoI
  13. In 2011, the lease was amended by agreement between the parties to reflect City's possible desire to expand the stadium as well as to grant the club the right to sell naming rights for the stadium, which the lease hadn't previously allow. In return, the club agreed (according to David Conn reporting in The Guardian) to pay the Council GBP 3 million per annum in rent and a further GBP 1 million annually for the right to dispose of naming rights.
  14. @Gordyiola has produced information from an FoI request suggesting that the figure, at least before the South Stand was expanded in 2015, the rental figure was higher than that reported by Conn. I'm going to stick to GBP 4 million in my calculations just because it's an easy, round figure.
We can see from the above that the Council has thus, as at the summer of 2025, will have received the following from the club with regard to the stadium:

(i) GBP 6 million as our cash contribution to the construction costs for the stadium; (ii) GBP 14 million realised from the asset (Maine Road) that we transferred at the same time; (iii) GBP 14 million in rent from August 2003 to summer 2011 (inclusive); and (iv) an estimated GBP 56 million in rent and compensation for the disposal of naming rights from August 2011 to August 2021 (inclusive).

Thus, in contrast to what our detractors say when they maintain we received the stadium for nothing, we reach a figure in the ballpark of GBP 90 million paid up to the summer of 2025. If this number is slightly out, then it won't be by very much at all.

Other points worth noting:
  1. As has been noted on many occasions before, though United did enter negotiations to use a larger stadium on the Commonwealth site that was eventually built, by 1999 City were decisively the only show in town, as point 4 above suggests. Had this stadium not been built for City, the Games would have been held in a 30,000-seater temporary venue then (as at Victoria, Canada in 1994) scaled back to a much smaller athletics stadium of 10,000 seats or less. Sport England put the cost of that option at GBP 60 million but the resultant venue would have had almost zero potential as the catalyst for major regeneration in East Manchester.
  2. By building a stadium that City could use as opposed to one where the sole Commonwealth Games legacy at the site would be a small athletics stadium, Sport England estimated that the Council had incurred an additional GBP 70 million of costs. Thus, the public purse has received far more than just its money back on the amount attributable to creating a new stadium fit for MCFC's use and stands to generate a further GBP 4 million annually for years to come, until MCFC is in a position to exercise the option it has to buy out the freehold under the lease.
  3. Further, there's been over 20 years of community use of the stadium, but we should also note that an arrangement is in force under which the rent paid to MCC by MCFC for use of the stadium is ring-fenced for sporting use, so can't be applied by MCC towards meeting its general budgetary needs. This was a stipulation in the original conditions for the grant by Sport England of funding to allow the stadium to be built for the Commonwealth Games and then leased to us afterwards.
  4. The above arrangement has allowed MCC to maintain the other sporting facilities around the stadium when other local authorities, in this long era of austerity and cost-cutting, have sought to save cash by closing similar facilities. A great example is Sheffield, where the 25,000-seater Don Valley athletics stadium and Ponds Forge international-standard swimming pool have been demolished as the local council there couldn't afford to fund their upkeep

TL, DR - The Council and Sport England have received fucking fantastic benefits from building a stadium for City to move into once the Commonwealth Games were over, even if you say nothing about the additional benefits for and investment in East Manchester brought by the owners attracted to the club in 2008. I haven't even started on that.
Click to expand...
I thought City paid around £20m for the fitting put of the stadium for football (i.e. of all the lower tier that was built then covered for the Games). Is thar included in the £33m cited?
 
jrb said:
Do you know what the initial cost of the London Olympics was? What the final cost was? What transforming the Olympic stadium to West Ham's stadium cost. The lease deal West Ham negotiated on the stadium? Google all that. It's an absolute eye opener. The Olympic Games was supposed to benefit the whole country financially and with jobs. Spin offs.. Did it? No it didn't. The actual games were a success. I'll admit that. Just like the 2002 Manchester Commonwealth Games were.

That's the same line Burnham and United are spinning about the new Wembley of the North.
Click to expand...

The Olympics did have a financial benefit that went further than the games themselves. Though a lot of this investment isn’t visible unless you know about it.

At the time I worked on a big Cultural Olympiad funded project that paid a lot of people with some activity in Manchester around music and performing arts.

That’s just one project, there were loads. It was a funding pot organisations could apply to, not necessarily just the games themselves.
 
Well Radcliffe has form not averse to building the new stadium elsewhere if a better deal comes along.
 
Vic said:
I thought City paid around £20m for the fitting put of the stadium for football (i.e. of all the lower tier that was built then covered for the Games). Is thar included in the £33m cited?
Click to expand...
City gave £6M cash plus Maine Road which was valued at £27M. £33M in total

When MCC actually sold MR for development, they received £14M (14 + 6 = 20)
 
petrusha said:
OK, as requested.

So, going back to what City have paid for the stadium. The facts used to be online at the Sport England website, but no longer are. Fortunately, at the time we moved, I used to write articles for a City fan site. They're no longer available but I retained my notes from one I wrote about the stadium. The terms on which we moved and other salient facts are as follows:
  1. Of the original GBP 110 million cost of the stadium, including the planned conversion to a football stadium, GBP 77 million was to be funded by Sports England grants from lottery funds and GBP 33 million was to be funded by Manchester City Council.
  2. Owing to cost overruns on the project, Sport England subsequently provided another GBP 20 million in grants.
  3. The cost of constructing a temporary stadium for the 2002 Games with a capacity of around 30K that would have been scaled back to an athletics venue of 8K to 10K would have been in the region of GBP 60 million.
  4. Though City agreed in principle in September 1998 to take a long-term lease of a permanent stadium appropriately converted for football, a binding contract to that effect wasn't signed until August 1999 - and Gary James has suggested that the deal may well never have been signed off on the Council/Sport England side had we not been promoted from the third tier around 10 weeks previously.
  5. As part of the deal, City agreed to make parts of the stadium available for community use on 100 days each year. I don't know what happens in practice, but this is the contractual commitment.
  6. City agreed to reimburse the Council's GBP 33 million paid towards construction in return for being granted a managing lease, under which we'd retain all money from additional use of the stadium for concerts, other sporting events and the like. We could, as happened with West Ham at Stratford, have done a deal whereby we'd have been a priority tenant, paid nothing towards the construction of the venue in the form we were to move into, and the Council would have reaped all the benefit from other use.
  7. This GBP 33 million was funded by way of a GBP 6 million cash payment and by the transfer of Maine Road (valued at GBP 27 million) into the Council's ownership.
  8. The value of Maine Road was somewhat controversial. Accountant Paul Stanley, a partner at Begbies Traynor who used to review City's accounts in the 1990s for the King of the Kippax fanzine under the alias 'Stan the Man' once called this "the most dubious accounting valuation I've ever come across", and he didn't mean it was undervalued.
  9. The Council's original intention was to lease out Maine Road as a sports venue, with Sale Sharks and Stockport County (seriously!) putting themselves forward for preferred bidder status. Sale won that battle but ultimately bottled out of taking their posh fans to Moss Side, so the site was sold for housing. It was reported at the time, based on information gained pursuant to an FoI request, that the Council received approximately GBP 14 million from the developer.
  10. In addition, we were to pay rent based on a percentage of the take from attendances in excess of the capacity at Maine Road when the lease was signed: 40% of net revenue from spectators between 34.5K and 41K, and 60% of net revenue generated by spectators in excess of 41K.
  11. This money was ringfenced and couldn't be used towards the Council's ordinary budgetary requirements. It was applied towards the upkeep of sporting facilities, including those on what was then referred to as the Sport City site around the stadium, which the Council claimed in the mid-2000s to attract 3 million visitors per annum outside MCFC home games (this seems a dubious figure, but it's what they claimed).
  12. In 2011, before the Etihad naming deal was signed, the Manchester Evening News claimed that MCFC had paid the Council GBP 14 million in rent over the first eight years of occupancy at the new stadium. I think from memory that this figure came from an FoI
  13. In 2011, the lease was amended by agreement between the parties to reflect City's possible desire to expand the stadium as well as to grant the club the right to sell naming rights for the stadium, which the lease hadn't previously allow. In return, the club agreed (according to David Conn reporting in The Guardian) to pay the Council GBP 3 million per annum in rent and a further GBP 1 million annually for the right to dispose of naming rights.
  14. @Gordyiola has produced information from an FoI request suggesting that the figure, at least before the South Stand was expanded in 2015, the rental figure was higher than that reported by Conn. I'm going to stick to GBP 4 million in my calculations just because it's an easy, round figure.
We can see from the above that the Council has thus, as at the summer of 2025, will have received the following from the club with regard to the stadium:

(i) GBP 6 million as our cash contribution to the construction costs for the stadium; (ii) GBP 14 million realised from the asset (Maine Road) that we transferred at the same time; (iii) GBP 14 million in rent from August 2003 to summer 2011 (inclusive); and (iv) an estimated GBP 56 million in rent and compensation for the disposal of naming rights from August 2011 to August 2021 (inclusive).

Thus, in contrast to what our detractors say when they maintain we received the stadium for nothing, we reach a figure in the ballpark of GBP 90 million paid up to the summer of 2025. If this number is slightly out, then it won't be by very much at all.

Other points worth noting:
  1. As has been noted on many occasions before, though United did enter negotiations to use a larger stadium on the Commonwealth site that was eventually built, by 1999 City were decisively the only show in town, as point 4 above suggests. Had this stadium not been built for City, the Games would have been held in a 30,000-seater temporary venue then (as at Victoria, Canada in 1994) scaled back to a much smaller athletics stadium of 10,000 seats or less. Sport England put the cost of that option at GBP 60 million but the resultant venue would have had almost zero potential as the catalyst for major regeneration in East Manchester.
  2. By building a stadium that City could use as opposed to one where the sole Commonwealth Games legacy at the site would be a small athletics stadium, Sport England estimated that the Council had incurred an additional GBP 70 million of costs. Thus, the public purse has received far more than just its money back on the amount attributable to creating a new stadium fit for MCFC's use and stands to generate a further GBP 4 million annually for years to come, until MCFC is in a position to exercise the option it has to buy out the freehold under the lease.
  3. Further, there's been over 20 years of community use of the stadium, but we should also note that an arrangement is in force under which the rent paid to MCC by MCFC for use of the stadium is ring-fenced for sporting use, so can't be applied by MCC towards meeting its general budgetary needs. This was a stipulation in the original conditions for the grant by Sport England of funding to allow the stadium to be built for the Commonwealth Games and then leased to us afterwards.
  4. The above arrangement has allowed MCC to maintain the other sporting facilities around the stadium when other local authorities, in this long era of austerity and cost-cutting, have sought to save cash by closing similar facilities. A great example is Sheffield, where the 25,000-seater Don Valley athletics stadium and Ponds Forge international-standard swimming pool have been demolished as the local council there couldn't afford to fund their upkeep

TL, DR - The Council and Sport England have received fucking fantastic benefits from building a stadium for City to move into once the Commonwealth Games were over, even if you say nothing about the additional benefits for and investment in East Manchester brought by the owners attracted to the club in 2008. I haven't even started on that.
Click to expand...
Top man - that's my lunch time reading sorted.

Very much appreciated..........
 
petrusha said:
OK, as requested.

So, going back to what City have paid for the stadium. The facts used to be online at the Sport England website, but no longer are. Fortunately, at the time we moved, I used to write articles for a City fan site. They're no longer available but I retained my notes from one I wrote about the stadium. The terms on which we moved and other salient facts are as follows:
  1. Of the original GBP 110 million cost of the stadium, including the planned conversion to a football stadium, GBP 77 million was to be funded by Sports England grants from lottery funds and GBP 33 million was to be funded by Manchester City Council.
  2. Owing to cost overruns on the project, Sport England subsequently provided another GBP 20 million in grants.
  3. The cost of constructing a temporary stadium for the 2002 Games with a capacity of around 30K that would have been scaled back to an athletics venue of 8K to 10K would have been in the region of GBP 60 million.
  4. Though City agreed in principle in September 1998 to take a long-term lease of a permanent stadium appropriately converted for football, a binding contract to that effect wasn't signed until August 1999 - and Gary James has suggested that the deal may well never have been signed off on the Council/Sport England side had we not been promoted from the third tier around 10 weeks previously.
  5. As part of the deal, City agreed to make parts of the stadium available for community use on 100 days each year. I don't know what happens in practice, but this is the contractual commitment.
  6. City agreed to reimburse the Council's GBP 33 million paid towards construction in return for being granted a managing lease, under which we'd retain all money from additional use of the stadium for concerts, other sporting events and the like. We could, as happened with West Ham at Stratford, have done a deal whereby we'd have been a priority tenant, paid nothing towards the construction of the venue in the form we were to move into, and the Council would have reaped all the benefit from other use.
  7. This GBP 33 million was funded by way of a GBP 6 million cash payment and by the transfer of Maine Road (valued at GBP 27 million) into the Council's ownership.
  8. The value of Maine Road was somewhat controversial. Accountant Paul Stanley, a partner at Begbies Traynor who used to review City's accounts in the 1990s for the King of the Kippax fanzine under the alias 'Stan the Man' once called this "the most dubious accounting valuation I've ever come across", and he didn't mean it was undervalued.
  9. The Council's original intention was to lease out Maine Road as a sports venue, with Sale Sharks and Stockport County (seriously!) putting themselves forward for preferred bidder status. Sale won that battle but ultimately bottled out of taking their posh fans to Moss Side, so the site was sold for housing. It was reported at the time, based on information gained pursuant to an FoI request, that the Council received approximately GBP 14 million from the developer.
  10. In addition, we were to pay rent based on a percentage of the take from attendances in excess of the capacity at Maine Road when the lease was signed: 40% of net revenue from spectators between 34.5K and 41K, and 60% of net revenue generated by spectators in excess of 41K.
  11. This money was ringfenced and couldn't be used towards the Council's ordinary budgetary requirements. It was applied towards the upkeep of sporting facilities, including those on what was then referred to as the Sport City site around the stadium, which the Council claimed in the mid-2000s to attract 3 million visitors per annum outside MCFC home games (this seems a dubious figure, but it's what they claimed).
  12. In 2011, before the Etihad naming deal was signed, the Manchester Evening News claimed that MCFC had paid the Council GBP 14 million in rent over the first eight years of occupancy at the new stadium. I think from memory that this figure came from an FoI
  13. In 2011, the lease was amended by agreement between the parties to reflect City's possible desire to expand the stadium as well as to grant the club the right to sell naming rights for the stadium, which the lease hadn't previously allow. In return, the club agreed (according to David Conn reporting in The Guardian) to pay the Council GBP 3 million per annum in rent and a further GBP 1 million annually for the right to dispose of naming rights.
  14. @Gordyiola has produced information from an FoI request suggesting that the figure, at least before the South Stand was expanded in 2015, the rental figure was higher than that reported by Conn. I'm going to stick to GBP 4 million in my calculations just because it's an easy, round figure.
We can see from the above that the Council has thus, as at the summer of 2025, will have received the following from the club with regard to the stadium:

(i) GBP 6 million as our cash contribution to the construction costs for the stadium; (ii) GBP 14 million realised from the asset (Maine Road) that we transferred at the same time; (iii) GBP 14 million in rent from August 2003 to summer 2011 (inclusive); and (iv) an estimated GBP 56 million in rent and compensation for the disposal of naming rights from August 2011 to August 2021 (inclusive).

Thus, in contrast to what our detractors say when they maintain we received the stadium for nothing, we reach a figure in the ballpark of GBP 90 million paid up to the summer of 2025. If this number is slightly out, then it won't be by very much at all.

Other points worth noting:
  1. As has been noted on many occasions before, though United did enter negotiations to use a larger stadium on the Commonwealth site that was eventually built, by 1999 City were decisively the only show in town, as point 4 above suggests. Had this stadium not been built for City, the Games would have been held in a 30,000-seater temporary venue then (as at Victoria, Canada in 1994) scaled back to a much smaller athletics stadium of 10,000 seats or less. Sport England put the cost of that option at GBP 60 million but the resultant venue would have had almost zero potential as the catalyst for major regeneration in East Manchester.
  2. By building a stadium that City could use as opposed to one where the sole Commonwealth Games legacy at the site would be a small athletics stadium, Sport England estimated that the Council had incurred an additional GBP 70 million of costs. Thus, the public purse has received far more than just its money back on the amount attributable to creating a new stadium fit for MCFC's use and stands to generate a further GBP 4 million annually for years to come, until MCFC is in a position to exercise the option it has to buy out the freehold under the lease.
  3. Further, there's been over 20 years of community use of the stadium, but we should also note that an arrangement is in force under which the rent paid to MCC by MCFC for use of the stadium is ring-fenced for sporting use, so can't be applied by MCC towards meeting its general budgetary needs. This was a stipulation in the original conditions for the grant by Sport England of funding to allow the stadium to be built for the Commonwealth Games and then leased to us afterwards.
  4. The above arrangement has allowed MCC to maintain the other sporting facilities around the stadium when other local authorities, in this long era of austerity and cost-cutting, have sought to save cash by closing similar facilities. A great example is Sheffield, where the 25,000-seater Don Valley athletics stadium and Ponds Forge international-standard swimming pool have been demolished as the local council there couldn't afford to fund their upkeep

TL, DR - The Council and Sport England have received fucking fantastic benefits from building a stadium for City to move into once the Commonwealth Games were over, even if you say nothing about the additional benefits for and investment in East Manchester brought by the owners attracted to the club in 2008. I haven't even started on that.
Click to expand...

Excellent post again & what stands out again are the wild claims made to get capex projects approved.

Corruption - an undervalued asset being sold for £28m & later for £14m.

Inflation of stadium builds, it’s fucking insane yet the 50% project overspending costs then are still 50% over now.
 
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Elbow beards said:
This may be the case, but he seems to lump the two together when speaking about regeneration. If it's left to the red cunts to fund their own stadium, it ain't happening so they'll have all these sparkly new shops, apartments and restaurants surrounding a shit dump of a stadium.
Click to expand...
I can see them getting a big loan that'll never get repaid, similar to but much bigger than FCScum otherwise all the monies updating the area will be dead money.
 
Vic said:
I can see why Citizen of Legoland might put you on ignore. I know about the WHU deal, that's why I asked the question.
Click to expand...
To be fair I only thought about putting @jrb on ignore to avoid the politics in this thread, not what jrb wrote specifically. Decided against it in the end because I like his posts in the North Stand thread.
 
petrusha said:
OK, as requested.

So, going back to what City have paid for the stadium. The facts used to be online at the Sport England website, but no longer are. Fortunately, at the time we moved, I used to write articles for a City fan site. They're no longer available but I retained my notes from one I wrote about the stadium. The terms on which we moved and other salient facts are as follows:
  1. Of the original GBP 110 million cost of the stadium, including the planned conversion to a football stadium, GBP 77 million was to be funded by Sports England grants from lottery funds and GBP 33 million was to be funded by Manchester City Council.
  2. Owing to cost overruns on the project, Sport England subsequently provided another GBP 20 million in grants.
  3. The cost of constructing a temporary stadium for the 2002 Games with a capacity of around 30K that would have been scaled back to an athletics venue of 8K to 10K would have been in the region of GBP 60 million.
  4. Though City agreed in principle in September 1998 to take a long-term lease of a permanent stadium appropriately converted for football, a binding contract to that effect wasn't signed until August 1999 - and Gary James has suggested that the deal may well never have been signed off on the Council/Sport England side had we not been promoted from the third tier around 10 weeks previously.
  5. As part of the deal, City agreed to make parts of the stadium available for community use on 100 days each year. I don't know what happens in practice, but this is the contractual commitment.
  6. City agreed to reimburse the Council's GBP 33 million paid towards construction in return for being granted a managing lease, under which we'd retain all money from additional use of the stadium for concerts, other sporting events and the like. We could, as happened with West Ham at Stratford, have done a deal whereby we'd have been a priority tenant, paid nothing towards the construction of the venue in the form we were to move into, and the Council would have reaped all the benefit from other use.
  7. This GBP 33 million was funded by way of a GBP 6 million cash payment and by the transfer of Maine Road (valued at GBP 27 million) into the Council's ownership.
  8. The value of Maine Road was somewhat controversial. Accountant Paul Stanley, a partner at Begbies Traynor who used to review City's accounts in the 1990s for the King of the Kippax fanzine under the alias 'Stan the Man' once called this "the most dubious accounting valuation I've ever come across", and he didn't mean it was undervalued.
  9. The Council's original intention was to lease out Maine Road as a sports venue, with Sale Sharks and Stockport County (seriously!) putting themselves forward for preferred bidder status. Sale won that battle but ultimately bottled out of taking their posh fans to Moss Side, so the site was sold for housing. It was reported at the time, based on information gained pursuant to an FoI request, that the Council received approximately GBP 14 million from the developer.
  10. In addition, we were to pay rent based on a percentage of the take from attendances in excess of the capacity at Maine Road when the lease was signed: 40% of net revenue from spectators between 34.5K and 41K, and 60% of net revenue generated by spectators in excess of 41K.
  11. This money was ringfenced and couldn't be used towards the Council's ordinary budgetary requirements. It was applied towards the upkeep of sporting facilities, including those on what was then referred to as the Sport City site around the stadium, which the Council claimed in the mid-2000s to attract 3 million visitors per annum outside MCFC home games (this seems a dubious figure, but it's what they claimed).
  12. In 2011, before the Etihad naming deal was signed, the Manchester Evening News claimed that MCFC had paid the Council GBP 14 million in rent over the first eight years of occupancy at the new stadium. I think from memory that this figure came from an FoI
  13. In 2011, the lease was amended by agreement between the parties to reflect City's possible desire to expand the stadium as well as to grant the club the right to sell naming rights for the stadium, which the lease hadn't previously allow. In return, the club agreed (according to David Conn reporting in The Guardian) to pay the Council GBP 3 million per annum in rent and a further GBP 1 million annually for the right to dispose of naming rights.
  14. @Gordyiola has produced information from an FoI request suggesting that the figure, at least before the South Stand was expanded in 2015, the rental figure was higher than that reported by Conn. I'm going to stick to GBP 4 million in my calculations just because it's an easy, round figure.
We can see from the above that the Council has thus, as at the summer of 2025, will have received the following from the club with regard to the stadium:

(i) GBP 6 million as our cash contribution to the construction costs for the stadium; (ii) GBP 14 million realised from the asset (Maine Road) that we transferred at the same time; (iii) GBP 14 million in rent from August 2003 to summer 2011 (inclusive); and (iv) an estimated GBP 56 million in rent and compensation for the disposal of naming rights from August 2011 to August 2021 (inclusive).

Thus, in contrast to what our detractors say when they maintain we received the stadium for nothing, we reach a figure in the ballpark of GBP 90 million paid up to the summer of 2025. If this number is slightly out, then it won't be by very much at all.

Other points worth noting:
  1. As has been noted on many occasions before, though United did enter negotiations to use a larger stadium on the Commonwealth site that was eventually built, by 1999 City were decisively the only show in town, as point 4 above suggests. Had this stadium not been built for City, the Games would have been held in a 30,000-seater temporary venue then (as at Victoria, Canada in 1994) scaled back to a much smaller athletics stadium of 10,000 seats or less. Sport England put the cost of that option at GBP 60 million but the resultant venue would have had almost zero potential as the catalyst for major regeneration in East Manchester.
  2. By building a stadium that City could use as opposed to one where the sole Commonwealth Games legacy at the site would be a small athletics stadium, Sport England estimated that the Council had incurred an additional GBP 70 million of costs. Thus, the public purse has received far more than just its money back on the amount attributable to creating a new stadium fit for MCFC's use and stands to generate a further GBP 4 million annually for years to come, until MCFC is in a position to exercise the option it has to buy out the freehold under the lease.
  3. Further, there's been over 20 years of community use of the stadium, but we should also note that an arrangement is in force under which the rent paid to MCC by MCFC for use of the stadium is ring-fenced for sporting use, so can't be applied by MCC towards meeting its general budgetary needs. This was a stipulation in the original conditions for the grant by Sport England of funding to allow the stadium to be built for the Commonwealth Games and then leased to us afterwards.
  4. The above arrangement has allowed MCC to maintain the other sporting facilities around the stadium when other local authorities, in this long era of austerity and cost-cutting, have sought to save cash by closing similar facilities. A great example is Sheffield, where the 25,000-seater Don Valley athletics stadium and Ponds Forge international-standard swimming pool have been demolished as the local council there couldn't afford to fund their upkeep

TL, DR - The Council and Sport England have received fucking fantastic benefits from building a stadium for City to move into once the Commonwealth Games were over, even if you say nothing about the additional benefits for and investment in East Manchester brought by the owners attracted to the club in 2008. I haven't even started on that.
Click to expand...
All 100%.

However when the rags, a petrochemical polluting tax exile, a 2nd rate politician and public tax payers money are manipulated together, there is only one outcome......scheming.....coercion...tax payers money....lies.... ...corruption.....manipulation....more lies....more tax payers money etc, et al ad infinitum.

This must be highlighted and campaigned so that not a penny of tax payers money is used to benefit the rags and their infrastructure.

Stringent 106 conditions must used to ensure that they pay up front for beneficial infrastructure costs, rail,tram, road and public realm.

This has been Rats objective from the start....property development with tax payers money.

He couldn't give two Monte Carlo fucks for the rags !!

BANG THE DRUM !!
 
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