I don't mean to be pedantic, but there are a number of inaccuracies here. It may not seem terribly important to most people that the lease isn't 999 years but 250, or that Thaksin didn't sell the lease when he sold the club (MCFC was the lessee, not Thaksin, so when Thaksin sold the club, the lease remained with the club automatically).
Nonetheless, when we argue about the stadium deal in the face of ignorant reports such as the Telegraph's recent one, we look biased and clueless if we get our facts wrong. Our detractors love that. When David Conn has targeted his excruciatingly dull hand-wringing bilge at this topic, I've seen several Blues on Twitter skewer themselves by repeating the biggest myth of all - the one about us having paid for conversion of the stadium for football.
We didn't. The deal was for us to receive a stadium ready for football in return for our commitment to lease it for 250 years. But what we received was the shell of a stadium, without any equipped or kitted out office facilities, dressing rooms, medical facilities, corporate concessions, hospitality facilities and so on. We had to fit these out ourselves and at our own cost (which, incidentally, grew way past original estimates and contributed to the club's poor financial situation in the years following the move).
The best way to address claims or innuendo such as that in the Telegraph this week is to examine forensically what the deal actually involved. 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:
- 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.
- Owing to cost overruns on the project, Sport England subsequently provided another GBP 20 million in grants.
- 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.
- 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 probably never would have been signed on the Council/Sport England side had we not been promoted from the third tier around 10 weeks previously.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- The Council's original intention was to lease out Maine Road as a sports venue, but talks with Sale Sharks and Stockport County came to nothing, so the site was sold for housing. The Council received approximately GBP 14 million from the developer.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 (the lease hadn't previously allowed this). In return, the club agreed 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.
We can see from the above that the Council has thus, as at the summer of 2021, 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 and GBP 14 million realised from the asset (Maine Road) that we transferred at the same time; (ii) GBP 14 million in rent from August 2003 to May 2011 (inclusive); and (iii) GBP 40 million* in rent and compensation for the disposal of naming rights from August 2011 to August 2021 (inclusive).
* - At least, there have been no reports I've read of this money being reduced owing to Covid in the last 18 months.
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, the Council and Sport England incurred an additional GBP 70 million of costs. As at summer 2021, the Council has recouped around GBP 74 million from MCFC. In other words, it's more than broken even and stands to generate 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.
Further, there's been 18 years of community use of the stadium and an arrangement in force that's allowed the maintenance of the other sporting facilities around the stadium. That's to say nothing of having attracted an investor that's prepared to invest to great effect more widely in East Manchester.
Yet, despite the above, we get media arseholes bitching about the arrangement. Do they really think it would have been better for Manchester to have a 10K athletics stadium as the main legacy on the stadium site? In any case, such an arena would probably have been knocked down by now as the Council struggled to find the cash for its upkeep in a period of austerity, as happened in Sheffield with Don Valley. Yet still you get journalists bleating that what happened wasn't fair.
We also keep getting these lazy comparisons with West Ham. There, you've got a facility that was far more costly to start with and that, unlike ours, wasn't built with a view to conversion into a football stadium. In addition, the lease is granted on a totally different basis, too, so the two situations aren't remotely comparable. I don't know enough about West Ham's deal to comment authoritatively, but te truth with ours is that the Council and the club have both done fantastically well out of the arrangement.
Nor have owners of MCFC unduly benefitted from the injection of public cash into the stadium. The club had a share issue at the back end of 1996 where it was valued at over GBP 20 million, and the valuation had risen to GBP 55 million when Sky bought in at the back end of 1999. But the move to the new stadium hardly had a stratospheric effect on the valuation so that the shareholders could make a killing. Quite the contrary, in fact.
Indeed, when Thaksin came in, he paid GBP 21.5 million for the shares, so the club's value had collapsed after the move. He was estimated to have made a GBP 20 million profit on that when he sold up a year later, but this was scarcely stadium related and owed more to the increased international profile we had under Thaksin and Sven.
One day, just for a change, it would be nice to have a knowledgeable piece without bias written in the national press about the business aspects of our club. At the moment, what we get is either vapid and clueless, malevolently agenda-driven, or both. I'm tired of it.
