in a nutshell Chewie, the club couldn't. No club anywhere should expect the council to help them out (Doncaster's did - £32m), but it is something that I feel the council could work with the club towards if it fulfils various criteria.
ie
- if such a vision came to pass then surely the club would be able to offer more paid jobs?
- the Community side of the club is woefully under advertised and (from what I can see) does a wonderful job - much of this is what is says on the tin and is for the benefit of the community
- as a venue for things other than football such as the Carnival, Mela, Music Concerts
- the 'training pitches' would be maintained by the club but could be for use by the boys leagues thus taking some of the strain off the Parks Department.
- as a full time, professionally operated business, then the club could potentially offer far more educational openings than it already does?
It's all pie in the sky, but the Council could reap a far higher nominal rent than the nominal rent it is bound to at the moment. Just to put any kind of a figure to it I believe the current rent to be less than £1000 per year and we have some sort of covenant in place that we can live there at the agreed price for x number of decades. If the council were to fund some sort of venue that we operate we could potentially pay a rent of say £100,000 per annum. The council would recoup its investment in a short set of years, and would have generated a good lump of goodwill, and would have improved the facilities stock of its constituents, and would have helped its chief export to sell itself better. The club, whilst being saddled with a significantly higher expense than it currently has, would be provided with the means to generate its own income from better facilities than it currently has, whilst also getting the opportunity to win back many of the fans lost to a dripping stand roof or putting their foot through a pi$$ sodden portakabin floor.
In reality it would never happen and the best we could hope for from the council would be that they sell the ground out from under us and offer us some sort of recompense to ****** off to the outskirts of the borough where they can't see us.