There are only two options. Redevelopment or moving. I do think the latter is a more likely scenario than many people would believe. Particularly if we get new owners. don’t want us to ever leave the Lane. But it might just make sense.
Don't agree.
Every move to a new stadium tends to have a sound business case.
Often the cost to build a new stadium represents much better value for money than renovating the old stadium.
Reasons to stay at Bramall Lane
1: Location
The location of Bramall Lane is currently an asset, easy for large crowds to arrive and dissipate.
Unlike at Hillsboro we have loads of road access so no massive bottlenecks where traffic is stuck in queues for over 1 hour.
2: Access around the stadium
Accept that there's no access for anything at Bramall Lane or John Street
however there's plenty of land behind the Kop and next to the South stand.
This means we can leave both stands open and operational whilst prep work and building work is being done.
Where as at Hillsboro they are hemmed in by houses, so don't have much of a footprint to expand on therir site.
Disadvantages of the current stadium
Many away fans often comment about BL being the best stadium in the Championship, the history and heritage makes it stand out.
However there are 2 areas of concern regards our current stadium.
1: The Kop: Looks OK from inside the stadium but if I was bringing a visitor on a rainy day I'd feel slightly embarrassed that there's a makeshift concourse with no protection against the wind and rain. It was only meant as a temporary solution and for fans is the most important stand for renovating.
2: The South stand: I'm not talking from a fans point of view, its perfectly adequate and much better than Sheff Weds North stand that is antiquated in comparison.
However the media centre, boardroom, changing rooms, executive areas are THE FACE of a club.
The fashion these days is for a club to make these areas top notch in order to impress VIP visitors.
Really believe it's important for an owner to be able to invite his guest to Bramall Lane and feel extra proud of the stadium.
The idea would be the guest would drive down the slope into the underground car park, then catch the lift which leads them directly into the palatial boardroom.
The same idea can be attached to having a posh top class media centre, posh impressive board room, posh/ impressive executive areas, huge impressive changing rooms for the players all inside the revamped expanded South stand. The idea is that these influential people all leave Bramall Lane thinking even by PL standard "that's a really impressive stadium". Sheffielders frown on anything "posh" but in the real world it's pretty important to impress.
So we don't need to move to achieve our aims. Modernising the Kop and South stand would achieve everything we wanted taking the capacity to 41K
and would be much cheaper than building a stadium from scratch. The only downside is organising building work whilst trying to prevent a reduction in capacity.
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