• ****Join the YF Fantasy EFL League: HERE. ****

Potential New Ground

Status
Not open for further replies.
Yellows1

Yellows1

Well-known member
Joined
7 Dec 2017
Messages
1,318
Anyone heard anything more on this, have we identified any more sites etc. correct me if I’m wrong but the lease runs out 2025.
 
There’s so much speculation going on. Water Eaton has been mentioned near Kidlington. There was talk about a fourth stand going up to prepare for the championship. It’s concerning that we are only five years away from the lease finishing.
It’ll probably take two years to build a ground that’s assuming we can get planning permission.
The thought of sharing grounds with Wycombe isn’t very appealing
 
Marked Ox said:
Basically rebuilding from scratch!
Click to expand...
Probably still much easier than finding land, getting permission, dealing with objections etc etc.
I suppose (if they buy the stadium) from our point of view, the devil will be in the detail - how much of the surrounding land/businesses will they buy, how much and what will they do to the stadium? Where is the return for them? What security of tenure would the club have in the stadium - and how much will it cost? Do we benefit form the advertising, food, conference facilities?
 
Can we bury Kassam under the structure as a permanent memory of that journey he took us on in the late nineties and into the 21st century?
 
If we were to buy land for a new ground, I say we but mean the club or actually i mean the owner/board. What is people's opinion on what they would find acceptable in terms of ownership? Worst case scenario we relocate but the same ownership issue exists with the club not owning the ground, fine currently but if the owner sells up then what? Or is the best scenario, owner buys site and builds the stadium and signs it over to the club to own but the owner retains ownership of the surrounding land?
 
Peterdev said:
Can we bury Kassam under the structure as a permanent memory of that journey he took us on in the late nineties and into the 21st century?
Click to expand...

Can somebody mark that journey in pictorial form, would be a best seller?
 
I'm clinging to the hope that the board will come up with a development that delivers both what we need and want and, what will be received with enthusiasm by local authorities. It would then need a short extension to the "arrangement" at Grenoble road while the new stadium was built. FK would have a deadline upon which he could send in the demolishing team and flog the land for a fortune as housing etc. The alternative is this rolling 25 year lease deal that would be a mill stone around the neck of the club.
Looking at recent planning applications it is clear that green belt land is being developed around Oxford. eg 207 house development at Barton.
If only we could be party to what is, without doubt, going on behind closed doors!
 
With the current planning situation, it appears from the outside the best time to get a new site/ ground. Maybe a once in a lifetime opportunity to move from Grenoble Road (or buy the ground and develop it although with Kass** I somehow doubt it)
At least we appear to have owners who are experienced in building new sports stadium and can afford it
 
nick68 said:
If we were to buy land for a new ground, I say we but mean the club or actually i mean the owner/board. What is people's opinion on what they would find acceptable in terms of ownership? Worst case scenario we relocate but the same ownership issue exists with the club not owning the ground, fine currently but if the owner sells up then what? Or is the best scenario, owner buys site and builds the stadium and signs it over to the club to own but the owner retains ownership of the surrounding land?
Click to expand...
Almost anything would be better than the deal we currently have. For us to end up even worse off than we are presently would take some REAL evil from the current ownership. We have nothing to our name and have been boxed into this appalling situation by a combination of shrewd devilry and utter negligence going back more than 20 years. If after everything that has happened to this club anybody felt the need to put us in an even worse situation, it would be genuinely sadistic. I really hope that wouldn’t happen, and I don’t think it would.

I personally believe that were we to be talking about a new development, the ground would still not be owned by the club but we would get a much more acceptable, infinitely fairer deal. At present we pay an absolute fortune in rent, have zero use of any facilities outside specified match day hours and also have no ability to generate money through them from an operational standpoint, and we also don’t even get a penny from food and drink sales. When you stack that all up, it’s really hard to get a worse deal, and that’s before you even throw in the fact that the damn thing was never even finished and only has three sides. I don’t think there’s any reason the club would be given the stadium deeds regardless of what else was built as part of it. There’s no such thing as charity in business, especially at the level some of our board members operate. I’m not even sure that the club should ever own the stadium itself again anyway, because that way whoever owns the club can just strip it all over again. I think all stadiums should be at least part owned by a trust of some description that permanently ties it to a particular club, and means it can’t be ripped away or leveraged for debt on a whim without any opposition or knowledge.

I think what they’re more likely to go for in the event of a new build is a massive retail / leisure facility built alongside a stadium, which as well as providing commercial revenue opportunities due to the retail aspect may also involve council subsidies in relation to the leisure branches. Cheaper land / grants etc could be forthcoming as this development would be classed as benefitting the wider community, and a certain number of hours use for schools and colleges alongside paid consumer rental could be negotiated. It would also allow a large housing development to take place where we currently play, so all things considered it could be quite attractive for the people on our board to be cut a very favourable deal by planners and so forth. Oxford’s leisure facilities are positively atrocious for a city of its status and prestige, so anything that can boost this without it being purely funded by the state would surely be incredibly attractive. Government never enjoys paying for anything itself after all.

A new development would make a lot of sense, and if it got us a better deal in a nicer, finished stadium, I’d be more than happy to help move the statue of Tiger into place, bow tie and all. If they can get a deal that means they make their money and we end up better off, that’s an enormous win.
 
RyanioBirdio said:
Almost anything would be better than the deal we currently have. For us to end up even worse off than we are presently would take some REAL evil from the current ownership. We have nothing to our name and have been boxed into this appalling situation by a combination of shrewd devilry and utter negligence going back more than 20 years. If after everything that has happened to this club anybody felt the need to put us in an even worse situation, it would be genuinely sadistic. I really hope that wouldn’t happen, and I don’t think it would.

I personally believe that were we to be talking about a new development, the ground would still not be owned by the club but we would get a much more acceptable, infinitely fairer deal. At present we pay an absolute fortune in rent, have zero use of any facilities outside specified match day hours and also have no ability to generate money through them from an operational standpoint, and we also don’t even get a penny from food and drink sales. When you stack that all up, it’s really hard to get a worse deal, and that’s before you even throw in the fact that the damn thing was never even finished and only has three sides. I don’t think there’s any reason the club would be given the stadium deeds regardless of what else was built as part of it. There’s no such thing as charity in business, especially at the level some of our board members operate. I’m not even sure that the club should ever own the stadium itself again anyway, because that way whoever owns the club can just strip it all over again. I think all stadiums should be at least part owned by a trust of some description that permanently ties it to a particular club, and means it can’t be ripped away or leveraged for debt on a whim without any opposition or knowledge.

I think what they’re more likely to go for in the event of a new build is a massive retail / leisure facility built alongside a stadium, which as well as providing commercial revenue opportunities due to the retail aspect may also involve council subsidies in relation to the leisure branches. Cheaper land / grants etc could be forthcoming as this development would be classed as benefitting the wider community, and a certain number of hours use for schools and colleges alongside paid consumer rental could be negotiated. It would also allow a large housing development to take place where we currently play, so all things considered it could be quite attractive for the people on our board to be cut a very favourable deal by planners and so forth. Oxford’s leisure facilities are positively atrocious for a city of its status and prestige, so anything that can boost this without it being purely funded by the state would surely be incredibly attractive. Government never enjoys paying for anything itself after all.

A new development would make a lot of sense, and if it got us a better deal in a nicer, finished stadium, I’d be more than happy to help move the statue of Tiger into place, bow tie and all. If they can get a deal that means they make their money and we end up better off, that’s an enormous win.
Click to expand...
Common sense would say that this is the only way.
 
Believe it or not Kassam has spent £250k of his own money on the pitch for this season. Also close to purchasing heat lights for the area of pitch always in shade under the south stand. Maybe, just maybe he’s starting to have a change of heart towards the club. I certainly don’t understand the people slating it for a stadium. It really isn’t that bad. Put a 4th stand on it, personalise it a bit to really make it our own and you’re sorted imo!
 
Yellow Hammer said:
Believe it or not Kassam has spent £250k of his own money on the pitch for this season. Also close to purchasing heat lights for the area of pitch always in shade under the south stand. Maybe, just maybe he’s starting to have a change of heart towards the club. I certainly don’t understand the people slating it for a stadium. It really isn’t that bad. Put a 4th stand on it, personalise it a bit to really make it our own and you’re sorted imo!
Click to expand...
I don't believe that.
 
Even if our billionaires can get Kassam to play ball we'll be in a much better position going forward, not that it can get worse. Even if they're not going to build/buy a stadium, surely they'd be able to negotiate a better lease, which, although not the holy grail, would be infinitely better than now.
 
Yellow Hammer said:
I certainly don’t understand the people slating it for a stadium. It really isn’t that bad. Put a 4th stand on it, personalise it a bit to really make it our own and you’re sorted imo!
Click to expand...
The fact that you’re saying what you’d need to do to make it alright only proves that it currently isn’t great - otherwise you wouldn’t need to do such things. It needs a fourth stand, all four corners then need filling in (the gaping corners are arguably more of an issue than an open end, in a weird way), and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The inside of the stadium is soulless and unfinished, and the public facilities are damn near hazardous at their worst. Considering the bloke who owns it nicked our old stadium off us, and then spent less than he sold that for on supposedly ‘finishing’ this one, which he then maintained ownership of even before the club was sold in 2006, it’s pretty shocking. For a stadium some 18 years old it’s in bad nick, was never completed and is also blocked in by all of his other businesses for good measure.

I don’t agree that people blindly and ferociously trying to attack and P**s Firoz Kassam off is remotely helpful to the club, because rightly or wrongly he has us in a vice and that means spitting at him constantly is basically the dumbest thing you can do while you’re in there, but I’m not going to thank him for a new pitch (if that’s even true) when we pay a million pounds a year to play there. Especially when he never thought enough of us to finish or maintain the very stadium he effectively stole from us in the first place. And trust me, the amount of corners he cut and the amount of things that don’t work behind the scenes is pretty significant. I would know, it used to be my office.

It is absolutely not a stadium that I think anyone could describe as ‘not so bad’ in its current form.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Similar threads

bicesterox
General Training ground development
Replies
5
Views
1K
MJB
MJB
Oslernorth
The Manor Grounds old seats used in new football ground in Leamington?
Replies
6
Views
2K
Older Shotts
Older Shotts
MarkG
General Manor ground model
Replies
10
Views
3K
Wallop
W
Ox4Eva
Ground signs
Replies
0
Views
2K
Ox4Eva
Ox4Eva
WokinghamYellow
Considering moving to Non League ground
11 12 13
Replies
259
Views
53K
Essexyellows
Essexyellows
Back
Top Bottom