You've talked previously about plans for a new stadium on the CFA site so I presume that this is kind of a backup plan. Where MCFC go in stadium terms after the current expansion is a topic that really interests me. You'd be very welcome to share anything you know, including as to which plan is preferred.
I'm happy to take the above and your other posts on trust as I lack the insider knowledge or contacts to verify it. I once had both and as a result know that, in the immediate post-takeover period, there were serious suggestions of a new stadium being built on either what's now the CFA site or on the North Car Parks.
In the interests of preserving a positive relationship with Manchester City Council, the new stadium idea was ditched in fairly short order after the takeover, or at least deferred for what, if it's revived, will be a generation at a minimum. In the meantime, a plan to expand the current stadium was devised in 2009 or so, with all stands having their capacity increased and with the overall figure being somewhere in the 80,000 ballpark.
Presumably all plans, whether for a new stadium or an additionally expanded version of the current one, have evolved in the last 15 years so an updated version of the first plan for CoMS (as it then was) is what you're referring to in the quoted post. As the Mail reported in 2010, the intention back then was to complete the project before the 2018 World Cup as long as England's bid for the right to host it was successful. The idea was that our stadium would be chosen ahead of the decaying Old Trafford to join Wembley as the venue for one of the competition's semi-finals.
When the tournament wasn't awarded to England and the opportunity was lost to showcase the transformative effect of our ownership in a fixture of such vast global interest, the expansion timetable changed and we'll still be only halfway through the plans come 2026. In my opinion, we'll finally be beginning work on the Collar Site at that point. I know nothing about the practicalities of construction, but if the East Stand is to be expanded at some stage, wouldn't it make sense for that to be done in parallel with work on the Collar Site?
Whether my Collar Site aspiration proves realistic is yet to be seen (I've been wrong about this before), but whatever happens with that potential development I think there are interesting questions as to how City respond to the planned expansion of the Swamp or the construction of a new United stadium on land adjacent to it.
Knowledgeable observers agree that both Sheikh Mansour and Silver Lake have both invested to receive a return and vanity basically plays no role in their thinking. Sportswashing, moreover, is a nonsense concept invented for marketing purposes by NGOs acting in their own self-interest. Nonetheless, City are to some degree used as an instrument of Abu Dhabi soft power. Is that interest really served by our out-of-town rivals stealing a march on us?
It may be that, after the North Stand is developed, there's no major stadium work on the Campus for a considerable time. On the other hand, history suggests that changes will be required at some point. I hope that a debate may result on the Campus thread about what those (and any knock-on effects for the Campus as a whole) might be and when they might occur.
EDIT - I've removed from my post the statements about me intending to post about the above to initiate a discussion on the 'Etihad Campus, Stadium and Collar Site Development Thread'. I won't be doing so, in fact, because I've just discovered that the thread has been locked. I don't think it worth starting a new thread for the discussion so this one will have to do even if it's not really the same topic, IMO.
