New stadium thread

[tom_widdows]

Some lovely comments in the stadium summary page

[Elgindon]

More here https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-59179485

[tom_widdows]

On 07/05/2021 at 00:19, tom_widdows said:

Best hope for a new stadium by the beach is to keep the press coverage to a minimum until plans are sorted and contracts are signed
The more fancy 3D images that get banded out in the press, the less chance of a project proceeding.....unless its blocks of flats of course

 

[RicoS321]

It's great that the fancy images still have pittodrie in them. The colts will be in the first division by then and will need somewhere to play.

[tom_widdows]

4 minutes ago, RicoS321 said:

It's great that the fancy images still have pittodrie in them. The colts will be in the first division by then and will need somewhere to play.

Maybe it will be redevelped into luxury flats in the same way Highbury was

[RicoS321]

25 minutes ago, tom_widdows said:

Maybe it will be redevelped into luxury flats in the same way Highbury was

I'd love a couple of bi-folds where the main stand entrance is. Looking out across the blaze car park. Beautiful.

[Panda]

I'm loving the sense of humour Aberdeen City Council appear to have developed recently.

[tom_widdows]

https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/59645936

Personally dont have any objections to reducing the capacity but I'd like to see walk-ups being allowed to buy a ticket at the turnstiles (cash or card) rather than having to go to a ticket office which inevitably has a long queue of people picking up tickets they bought online.

Will be astounded if the stadium looks anywhere close to the most recent CGI images

[RicoS321]

46 minutes ago, tom_widdows said:

https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/59645936

Personally dont have any objections to reducing the capacity but I'd like to see walk-ups being allowed to buy a ticket at the turnstiles (cash or card) rather than having to go to a ticket office which inevitably has a long queue of people picking up tickets they bought online.

Will be astounded if the stadium looks anywhere close to the most recent CGI images

Agree about the capacity. I think 17k would be a good size, and infinitely better than a 20k stadium in Aberdeenshire. Unless the plan was always to trick the council into proposing a better location, you have to wonder about the Westhill abomination. It really is the most deluded plan on the planet. Can't believe the number of dons fans who thought it was even remotely acceptable.

The ticket thing is a bit of a non-issue these days. You just buy it on your phone and walk in scanning the phone. By 2025 it'll be 99% of purchases. 

[Panda]

Lowering capacity and creating more of a supply and demand, I would urge caution on championing the club's motives on this.

The Breidablik game showed the club's hand when, thinking there would be a surge for tickets because it was the first game allowed at near full capacity, set the prices at £32-34 while all the other Scottish clubs in Europe were much cheaper.

Smaller stadium, less tickets, bump the prices right up. I can see Aberdeen fans paying through the roof if they get to the group stages of any European competitions.

Also, "17,000 is big enough":-

2018-19 season: Four crowds over 17,000

2017-18: Eight crowds over 17,000

2016-17: Four crowds over 17,000

That's with an old stadium and a team that hasn't made the group stages in Europe since 2008. Fix both those and the crowds go up, no?

[RicoS321]

31 minutes ago, Panda said:

Lowering capacity and creating more of a supply and demand, I would urge caution on championing the club's motives on this.

The Breidablik game showed the club's hand when, thinking there would be a surge for tickets because it was the first game allowed at near full capacity, set the prices at £32-34 while all the other Scottish clubs in Europe were much cheaper.

Smaller stadium, less tickets, bump the prices right up. I can see Aberdeen fans paying through the roof if they get to the group stages of any European competitions.

Also, "17,000 is big enough":-

2018-19 season: Four crowds over 17,000

2017-18: Eight crowds over 17,000

2016-17: Four crowds over 17,000

That's with an old stadium and a team that hasn't made the group stages in Europe since 2008. Fix both those and the crowds go up, no?

A good point. I would say that their motive is affordability - first and foremost - however. I think you'd have to offset the missed income on those attendances versus the cost associated with having empty seats for the overwhelming majority of games. The four games in 18-19 would have resulted in 9k seats of missed revenue (assuming 17k capacity). Maybe £250k? That could be recouped quite easily if other fixtures increased attendance due to scarcity as per the club's plan. 

I'm not convinced that the group stages would actually return us the type of crowd we think either. They would if we weren't regularly getting there of course but then if we regularly got to that stage I could easily envisage a drop off in popularity unless we get a perceived "big side". I just don't think we're that well supported.

One thing that did bother me was the re-selling of tickets. A great concept, but I have a feeling that all tickets will then be tied to your electronic device, and you won't be able to pass on to a friend for nothing. I'm guessing if it's just a small admin fee that might be okay, but it's free just now.

[Slim]

I would be cautious about reducing the capacity.
 

If the club’s business plan/ambition is to become one of the top 100 UEFA clubs and be playing attractive football with a team consisting of home grown players and exciting flair players using Atlanta’s connections, this alone should see an increase in attendances.

If we want to revolutionise the match day experience so people are bringing their families to hang out around the stadium for hours because there’s so much atmosphere and entertainment, this should be hand in hand with an increase in attendances.

Voluntarily reducing the capacity contradicts the rest of their business plan. Of course the business plan is full of holes, but if it was achieved, a 17,000 seater stadium would be at capacity several times a season. 

Also need to consider the impact of any future developments like a switch to summer football or admission to a European “Super League”, bars being allowed to open, etc.

Perhaps someone clever can design a stadium that has smaller upper tiers in the 4 stands that can easily be “hidden” when not in use. 

[tom_widdows]

32 minutes ago, Slim said:

Perhaps someone clever can design a stadium that has smaller upper tiers in the 4 stands that can easily be “hidden” when not in use. 

Like in Vancouver?
It is slightly easier with 'indoor' stadiums

Edited December 14, 2021 by tom_widdows

[RicoS321]

1 hour ago, tom_widdows said:

Like in Vancouver?
It is slightly easier with 'indoor' stadiums

Looks cool. I mean, it's no Brockville, but it's nice.

[tom_widdows]

Was a bit grim when i did the tour. Tour guide was trying to wax lyrical about the whitecaps but then took a bigger dislike to me when I asked how the Queen of the South boy they had on loan was settling in.

[wokinginashearerwonderland]

This is where Cormack is going all a bit too Americany for my liking.  Looking at the bare facts you would say 90% of our fans are season ticket holders but in reality the season ticket holders are not actually the majority of the supporters.  The two or three thousand pay as you go fans at each game are a different two or three thousand each time so there are actually thousands of these but they maybe only go to half a dozen games each during a season.  These people don't want/cannot afford a season ticket for a variety of reasons but they still want to have the option of going to games.  Why centre it all around season ticket holders?  If you do not have a season ticket and want to go to a Rangers game, you don't want to have to wait until the Friday to see whether a season ticket holder can be bothered to turn up before you know whether you can get a ticket or not, you want a bit of warning.  Also, if we draw a decent side in Europe, does he not want the option of getting a bigger crowd in than usual?  What about hosting the odd Scotland international, concert or boxing match?  Also cannot believe it would cost another £16M just for another 4,000 seats in stands that you are already building anyway.  

The whole reason for moving away from Pittodrie was that the existing site could not accommodate a re-developed stadium of more than 12,000 fans which was "not enough for the ambitions of the club" yet we are now talking about a stadium which is not an awful lot more.

One of the main reasons that a 16 team league has been shot down is that the provincial clubs would miss out on revenue by only being able to host the old firm for two games each season.  Now we are planning to have a stadium with only 500 away fans in it anyway.  We might as well just lay a plastic pitch while we are at it or maybe just play our home games at Cormack Park instead.

 

[RicoS321]

1 hour ago, wokinginashearerwonderland said:

This is where Cormack is going all a bit too Americany for my liking.  Looking at the bare facts you would say 90% of our fans are season ticket holders but in reality the season ticket holders are not actually the majority of the supporters.  The two or three thousand pay as you go fans at each game are a different two or three thousand each time so there are actually thousands of these but they maybe only go to half a dozen games each during a season.  These people don't want/cannot afford a season ticket for a variety of reasons but they still want to have the option of going to games.  Why centre it all around season ticket holders?  If you do not have a season ticket and want to go to a Rangers game, you don't want to have to wait until the Friday to see whether a season ticket holder can be bothered to turn up before you know whether you can get a ticket or not, you want a bit of warning.  Also, if we draw a decent side in Europe, does he not want the option of getting a bigger crowd in than usual?  What about hosting the odd Scotland international, concert or boxing match?  Also cannot believe it would cost another £16M just for another 4,000 seats in stands that you are already building anyway.  

The whole reason for moving away from Pittodrie was that the existing site could not accommodate a re-developed stadium of more than 12,000 fans which was "not enough for the ambitions of the club" yet we are now talking about a stadium which is not an awful lot more.

One of the main reasons that a 16 team league has been shot down is that the provincial clubs would miss out on revenue by only being able to host the old firm for two games each season.  Now we are planning to have a stadium with only 500 away fans in it anyway.  We might as well just lay a plastic pitch while we are at it or maybe just play our home games at Cormack Park instead.

 

But we've never had average crowds anywhere near 17K, even when we were good. Is this just realism? Should we be spending £16M to cater for the fans that only turn up for the big games (and sometimes not even then)? With the nation's league, there are going to be few friendlies and the opportunity to host a Scotland game is extremely limited (maybe once every five years?). Unless we were looking at 30K seats, there is no reason to hold Scotland games at a new pittodrie over tynecastle or Easter road. We definitely shouldn't be including that measure in our decision making. I also doubt that Elton John will be refusing a gig because of the extra 3K either, he'll either play in Aberdeen or not, and that occurs once a decade (and fuck that anyway). In both situations, we'd be paid for ground rental rather than ticket sales anyway.

I get the concern about being season ticket focused, but I don't think that you're point about waiting until a Friday is an issue. Most people will know whether or not they can go to a game in advance (I'll hand my ticket to my mate if I'm not going to be at the next game for example - before QR codes of course!) and will likely want to cash in on selling their ticket early. There's an offset there. However, the biggest problem I envisage that I hadn't considered until your post was not necessarily that people can't afford a ticket, but that those who can afford tickets but don't usually buy a season ticket will buy one so that they can go to the bigger games. The option to formally sell your unused ticket, coupled with scarcity, creates an apartheid between those who can afford to buy, say, 4 tickets and those that want to go to the majority of games but can't afford a season ticket. It returns a situation a lot like the DNA points scam. I could simply buy a ticket for a decent seat and sell it every week until a big game and then go to that. I'd like to see a way to counteract that so we can prioritise fans going to games (say if you attend <12 games per season you can only buy a half season ticket or some such). It's a difficult balance between forcing scarcity to get bigger crowds and being realistic as to our average crowds. I think 16K will result in too scarce a product, but 17K might produce the happy spot of having lots of unsold tickets regularly. For some weird reason, I'd feel happier if it was 18K. I can quite believe the £16M figure, you're talking an entire deck the length of the South to get an extra 4,000 seats. It's not a small thing. A sheet of OSB is around £1M today. 

I don't think it'll actually go ahead any time soon anyway. Maybe the reduced capacity is just to butter us up for a reduced capacity pittodrie when this latest idea gets booted out.

 

[Panda]

Cormack's answer when pushed on wanting 15,000 season ticket holders while building a 17,000 seater stadium smacked of someone who hadn't thought it through and was thinking up an answer on the spot.
 

As it goes I would, reluctantly, accept a smaller capacity stadium if it was going to be a cracker of a ground. But they need to show a bit more imagination than the all the single tier artist impressions they've released so far.

Lask Linz's plans for their new stadium are far more appealing.

18,000 capacity when all seated, otherwise 20,200. They also plan to close off the top tiers to make it a 12,000 capacity for smaller league games (their current stadium holds 6,000, and they move to another stadium for UEFA games where they average around 12,000/13000).

Article, including more photos & video, here:-

https://www.coliseum-online.com/austrian-club-lask-introduces-new-home/

 

 

[sheepheid]

I like that, except for the roof pitch. The roof on the new stadium needs to not point up to the sky like the south stand and release any noise. It’s need to be a low roof that tapers down towards the pitch, holding in an atmosphere

…..and keeping us dry!! 

[tom_widdows]

8 minutes ago, sheepheid said:

I like that, except for the roof pitch. The roof on the new stadium needs to not point up to the sky like the south stand and release any noise. It’s need to be a low roof that tapers down towards the pitch, holding in an atmosphere

…..and keeping us dry!! 

Ups the size and price of the steelwork as the water and snowloads will be increased plus it would be a drainage and maintainance nightmare. 
If you can find a stadium with a roof that tapers towards the pitch Ill be very surprised.

Edited December 15, 2021 by tom_widdows

[RicoS321]

1 minute ago, tom_widdows said:

Ups the size and price of the steelwork as the water and snowloads will be increased plus it would be a drainage and maintainance nightmare. 
If you can find a stadium with a roof that tapers towards the pitch Ill be very surprised.

The main stand

 

Edit: to clarify that was a joke.

Edited December 15, 2021 by RicoS321

[tom_widdows]

Knew i should have said modern.... and then I thought of where I had seen one. Lovely drainage ducts going into the mountain

Edited December 15, 2021 by tom_widdows

[RicoS321]

I wonder if we'll be able to take the pillars with us from the mainer?

[tom_widdows]

3 minutes ago, RicoS321 said:

I wonder if we'll be able to take the pillars with us from the mainer?

I'd like to think the stadium designer won't be copying Parkhead

[sheepheid]

Old Trafford has a roof that tapers down. To be honest I’d prefer one of the two they built in France recently where the roof closes….I’ll get my coat. 

but TW, I get what you are saying. I just think it would be a shame to end up with a new stadium that has no atmosphere.

even flatter roofs like Easter road would be fine. Imagine how shite 4 south stand designs would be