Lincoln City, have gone through this, new owners(investors) who proposed selling Sincil Bank and moving to a ‘better’ location. Their reasoning was for the club to progress it had to raise more revenue and its current location limited to football revenue only. They demonstrated that by moving they could gain revenue 52 weeks a year instead of just during the football season, all this was backed up with a plan, financial workings, proposals and open sessions for people to go look and ask questions. Generally speaking people in Lincoln are now open to the idea of moving grounds to improve the club. Of course all this was done on the backdrop of some success and a popular Management team backing it.
I don’t disagree with this approach. However, I’d say there’s enough land at Oakwell to alter things to make it work better if you put money into it. A lot of other stadiums are that tightly packed into built-up areas, there’s limited space for any development. Highbury being one particular example.
They haven’t got the money to pay the monies due for the club, but they want to buy oakwell. They likely want to buy oakwell to then take loans against the assets to pay the monies and/or to redevelop. thing is there’s plenty of land and space to build a new stadium/redevelop on existing land around oakwell, thing is that won’t generate any revenue or be self financing, it will just cost. Could they Sell oakwell and the land for x amount then pick up a piece of smaller land and build a new stadium elsewhere in the borough? That’s normally how these things are financed. thing is if you were Crynes/council why would you sell the land/ground at X price if you knew it was going to be sold on for more as housing land, why not just sell it to developers yourself? it’s all a bit of a mess. Ones thing for sure though, the first time since 1887 we’ve not had local owners with ties to the club and We’ve got this mess.
