Indeed. Actually, it already gets a lot more than you'd think. This old website, which hasn't been updated for years and predates the idea of the Etihad Campus, suggests that Sportcity (as it was officially called then) was "the chosen venue for over 400 events each year and [received] over 4,500,000 visits annually":
http://sportcity-manchester.com/
Only a million or so of that figure will have been people attending MCFC home fixtures. The rest will have been accounted for by the Regional Athletics Centre, the English Institute of Sport, the National Squash Centre, the Regional Tennis Centre and the Velodrome (I know they don't now count the last one as part of the Campus). But with the BMX Centre and City Football Academy now built as well, the figure for visits to the Campus and adjacent sports facilities is presumably higher than ever. Now, if we take the above figure of 3.5 million visitors annually on non-City matchdays, that's 9,500 per day. If plans go forward for a new university and other sports facilities on site, then you've potentially pretty decent patronage there even before we talk of any leisure attraction that might come along later.
There's actually a bit of history to this. Back in the late 1990s, when Manchester was planning for the Commonwealth Games, the Metrolink expansion was intended to be completed in time for the Games (it actually wasn't in place until 2013 because of funding issues). And the initial plan also encompassed the idea of diverting trains from Glossop and Marple via the East Manchester Loop past Sportcity and to Victoria. There would have been a new station with a rail/tram interchange Sportcity. The initial map showing the proposed new Metrolink line has a little rail icon next to this station. (I'd show it here but I can't find the map online at the moment).
As an aside, I don't know what, 20 years ago, they were planning to do with the freight traffic that uses that line. However, for my current purposes, I'm going to assume that there must have been a way to deal with that traffic in a different way back then and I'm also going to assume that it remains valid now. I'm happy to be corrected by anyone who knows better.
As far as I can tell the aspiration now is to create tram-train services from Marple and Glossop through Piccadilly. The great thing public bodies like about tram-type services of this nature is that they don't attract a subsidy whereas heavy rail services do, so the former is always going to be the preference. I therefore presume that routing Marple or Glossop trains via the East Manchester Loop to Victoria could only ever become a live issue again if the current tram-train trial in Sheffield were finally aborted. The current proposed start date is summer 2018 (already 3 years behind schedule):
http://www.railtechnologymagazine.c...ffield-tram-train-completion-date-finally-set
It will be a 2-year trial, so, even if it goes ahead as now planned and even if it's successful, we're going to be looking at 5 years from now until there are tram-train stations at Ashburys and Beswick within waolking distance of the Campus. However, no one's going to sink any serious cash into a new heavy rail station if the services using it might be converted to tram-train in the near future. So the question is which trains could you run via the East Manchester loop through a new Etihad Campus station if one were built.
I asked this a year or two back on the Skyscrapercity forum, where there are people with extraordinarily in-depth knowledge of the rail industry (among other things). The only viable suggestion in their view was to divert trains on the New Mills line. I'm not sure whether that would create a sufficient service to justify the investment that reinstating the line and building a new station. Instinctively, I doubt it, but I don't know enough about the issue to make a properly informed assessment.
