This summer, Leeds United regained ownership of Elland Road, two decades after selling it during a period of financial struggle. Now that the stadium is back under the club’s control, could we see some changes ahead?
Elland Road, the club’s home since 1919, was purchased by Greenfield Investment Pte Ltd in 2004. At the time, Greenfield was part of the same parent company that owned The Whites.
Leeds’ new majority owners, 49ers Enterprise, are no strangers to handling stadium projects, having already opened Levi’s Stadium for their NFL team, the San Francisco 49ers. So, could we see some exciting stadium plans for Elland Road in the near future?
Is a stadium expansion coming for Leeds?
Leeds CEO Angus Kinnear appeared on The Square Ball podcast and shared the latest updates on the 49ers Enterprises’ plans to expand Elland Road. The club chief noted that for the first time since he’s been involved with Leeds, there’s a real push to expand the stadium.
“The good news about the stadium is, for the first time in the six and a half years or seven years that I’ve been involved in the club, I think we’ve got some real traction behind the stadium,” Kinnear said about the situation. “So the 49ers have committed a multimillion-pound sum on putting together a project team which has environmentalists, transport planners, the design team, the structural engineers, the mechanical engineers.
“That team now is meeting two or three times a week with a view to submitting the planning application. There’s going to be an announcement very shortly about that. And within that, you’ll get a degree of granularity in the plans around stadium capacity. I think at the moment it’s looking like it’s going to be 53,000. That’s the most economic number.
“Within that, you’ll also get a sense of the broad split, which hasn’t been decided yet, between GA (general admission) and hospitality seats. But there’ll be a significant GA increase, but there will also be an increase in premium seats on that side as well, because the West Stand doesn’t really have any workable hospitality as it stands.”
It will be interesting to see if 49ers Enterprise does indeed put shovels in the ground soon and Elland Road begins seeing expansion.
