Leeds United announcement expected on Elland Road development with new capacity and project team revealed
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Leeds United are expecting to make an announcement soon on their plans for Elland Road redevelopment and a stadium capacity increase.
The latest number placed on Elland Road's capacity once 49ers Enterprises complete their planned work is 53,000 and CEO Angus Kinnear says a 'multi-million pound sum' has been spent already on securing planning permissions.
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Hide AdHe told The Square Ball: "So 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. So the 49ers are committed. You know, it's a multi-million pound sum spent 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 planning application. There will 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 scenes, but there will 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."
Kinnear says an increase in premium seats is fundamental to the redevelopment of the ground, but the new and improved North Stand would not include hospitality.
"There's no hiding from the fact that increasing the number of premium seats will be part of the plan," he said. "And that's why all of the planning applications that are currently underway are for the West Stand and the North Stand. And then the vision at the moment is the North Stand wouldn't have any hospitality at all, and the West Stand would have an increase in hospitality. Ultimately you cannot fund the stadium build just on GA seats. You need premium seats in there. And I think there will also be a bigger spread of premium seats.
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Hide Ad"So one of the things that Leeds United doesn't have, doesn't have very many of, is a sort of a base level of, I think in industry terms, premium GA, and it's effectively a GA seat which has an element of hospitality on it. But actually isn't a huge step up for supporters. And at both West Ham and Arsenal, we found lots and lots of existing season ticket holders were prepared to step up into premium general admission to get a better located seat and access to a bar."
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