The estimated cost of a new stadium is extraordinary. The timescale, remarkable. Upwards of £2 billion, and perhaps as long as six years from the start of the planning process to anything close to completion, with the team obliged to play elsewhere for as many as three seasons, perhaps more. Some fans would prefer Craven Cottage as a temporary groundshare for proximity. The club would look at Wembley for size and hospitality offering.
In the meantime, what happens to the Chelsea fanbase? CPO surveys have discovered Chelsea have the Premier League’s oldest season-ticket holder demographic – an average age of 58. By the time the club have a 60,000-capacity stadium it would also be seeking to attract a new generation of match-going fans, after years away from home.
The 40,341-capacity Stamford Bridge shrinks in size with growing match-day broadcaster demands. The most recent Deloitte audit of clubs’ finances had Chelsea’s annual match-day income at £82 million. Tottenham Hotspur’s was £125 million. Liverpool’s was £112 million. The ever more outdated Old Trafford earned Manchester United £126 million. To close the gap, Chelsea will have to build the most expensive stadium Europe has seen.
The club have bought most of the Oswald Stoll veterans housing site abutting the stadium for £80 million. The options to move elsewhere are now vanishingly small, although not impossible. The Earls Court development north of Stamford Bridge has a well-advanced masterplan with no provision for a stadium. Changing that course and the minds of the two applicable London borough councils would require a huge amount of money and political will.
Not rebuilding Stamford Bridge is not an option either, as Abramovich knew. The plan he commissioned was famously to dig downwards to accommodate a stadium bowl big enough and build across the two railway lines to the north and east. The vision was undoubtedly magnificent but, given what has happened since, one looks at those old projections for the future as one might a 1950s science fiction epic.