Yep.
He's killed all his credibility in one fell swoop by declaring that he thinks we don't need a new stadium.
We absolutely blatantly do. We've sold out more games this season than for any season since the 1980s. Some of that is down to the high number of season tickets but the demand for the club has clearly grown.
Yes we need more corporate boxes - in A NEW STADIUM!
We need a new stadium. The success of increasing revenue for Arsenal was IMO mainly due to have a new modern stadium with a bigger capacity and amazing infrastructure for everyone, these corporate boxes included. Almost nobody would want to go to a corporate box in Goodison, not many people want to make a visit to the last century.
The major problem with a renovated Goodison is the cost and the fact that the footprint around the ground would need to be made much bigger.
Look at Liverpool - they spent 10-15 years buying up all the properties around Anfield and managing them into a decline, to the point they had to be knocked down anyway.
By and large, the streets around Goodison are nearly all fully occupied. There's a church and a primary school that would need relocating - can you imagine the protest groups regarding both???!!!!
The stadium is landlocked and cannot be improved, and the funding isn't there to do it either.
A brand new stadium with large plot of land and the ability to plan a purpose built arena for the 21st century needs is what is needed at this point.
Anything else is a sticking plaster on a bullet wound.
There have been lots of posts suggesting that we can't redevelop goodison. I haven't quoted them all. But the suggestions that Goodison is landlocked etc and therefore can't be redeveloped are untrue. For a start we could build as big a stand as we wanted at the Park End (and that would just be a quick fix). There are actually many approaches we could take to redevelop it to provide both the increased capacity and corporate facilities.
Also, rather than seeing Goodisons age and condition as a burden, we should be playing on the fact that Goodison was the first purpose built football ground in the country, and has stands designed by Archibald Leitch.
I'll quote myself from the stadium thread where I discussed *one* of the approaches we could take. (Note there are many other ways this could be tackled... I just favoured this approach because it didn't require any land take)
https://www.grandoldteam.com/forum/...ate-within-months.66451/page-238#post-3361137
"When the main stand was built in 1970 they did it in such a way that would help future re-developments. That is why it doesn't line up with the pitch. The general idea would be:
1) Knock down the Park End
2) Move the pitch (towards the Park End) to be inline with the main stand (thus creating room at the Street End...)
3) Build a massive new Park End Stand with executive boxes. (Bear in mind that the Holte End at Villa has a seated capacity of > 13,000)
4) Knock down the Street End and build a new stand taking advantage of the increased space resulting from the pitch move. This would then solve the "church problem" - ie we wouldn't lose so much capacity from the space caused by the church.
5) Re-configure the main stand as follows:
5a) Build a new roof as per the original plans that doesn't need the big posts at the front (thus getting rid of most of the obstructed views)
5b) Add an executive tier below the top balcony (which gets rid of the rest of the obstructed views)
5c) Get rid of the existing lean-to executive boxes at the front and hence "re-claim" all of the enclosure
The above plan gives us new Park and Street End stands, a reconfigured main stand with no obstructed views, increased capacity, and a significant increase in our corporate capacity, without any need to land take.
The only remaining un-developed stand would be the Bullens road, which in the short term could (and should!) be kept as a heritage Archibald Leitch football stand. Again as mentioned earlier in the thread we could take off the iron-cladding and re-point the brickwork to show it off for the treasure that it is.
Ideas do exist for developing the Bullens Road, but of course this would require land take and re-locating the school, or including it in the new structure.
This is only one version of the Goodison redevelopment options available to us, but they just happen to be the ones that appeal to me. When I find the time I will upload the documents I have which show these plans in more detail."
