The roof of the proposed new Manchester United stadium has three points, which is more than can often be said for the team who will play underneath it. According to Nigel Dancey of the architectural firm Foster + Partners, the three giant masts will “create a distinctive presence on the skyline”, presumably in the same way that Roy Keane created a distinctive presence on Alf‑Inge Haaland’s knee.
But of course aesthetic quibbles are the least of our concerns here. If Manchester United want to erect a giant plastic canopy over their new 100,000-seat stadium in a way that evokes a chicken being wrapped before roasting, then frankly who are we to demur? Beauty is in the eye of the freeholder, and all that. The more pressing question – as someone who, unlike part-owner Jim Ratcliffe, still pays income tax in this country – is what exactly the rest of us are getting out of this.
Why knock down the biggest club stadium in the UK, the fifth biggest in Europe? Why not simply refurbish a venue that already generates plenty of revenue? Indeed, why even unveil this project now, before a single penny of funding for this £2bn project has been secured?
On the last of these at least, United’s chief operating officer, Collette Roche, had this to say. “Until you actually articulate the mission and show the art of the possible, nobody takes you seriously,” she said at the MIPIM property trade show in Cannes, where United were pitching for external investment. And of course for a club drowning in debt, laying off staff, projecting the redevelopment as a grand shiny infrastructure project is the only feasible way of unlocking the public money that will turn New Trafford into an effortless cash machine.
In one sense, this is a fait accompli. The government has given its backing, and Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, sounds supremely confident about securing the £200m‑£300m of government investment that would be required for related infrastructure. Already fantastical figures are wafting through the media ecosystem with a bare minimum of scrutiny: 17,000 new homes, 92,000 new jobs, an extra £7.3bn a year to the UK economy.
And it is at this point that we meet our first knot of resistance. The academic literature is pretty unequivocal on this point: economists have consistently found virtually no evidence to suggest that new stadiums provide any net benefit to a city in terms of wages, tax receipts or jobs. As the late economist Allen Sanderson put it: “If you want to inject money into the local economy, it would be better to drop it from a helicopter than invest it in a new ballpark.”
So where do these numbers come from? Mostly from somewhere else. Any uplift to local property prices comes at a cost to other areas of the city. Any new housing will almost certainly be hoovered up by buy-to-let investors. Meanwhile, increased leisure spending at New Trafford is, to a large extent, simply going to relocate leisure spending from elsewhere in Manchester. Put it like this: if someone builds a new restaurant near your favourite restaurant, you’re not suddenly going to start eating two dinners.
As for jobs, most of the extra work will be seasonal, part-time security and catering employment: the foundation stones of the exploitation economy. The plan to prefabricate the new stadium and move it up the Manchester ship canal will put a firm ceiling on the amount of construction labour required. Indeed, one of the centrepieces of the new development involves relocating the Trafford Park rail freight terminal beside the stadium, which will probably be moved at great expense to Parkside East in St Helens. So, actually … moving jobs out of Manchester to Merseyside. How does that tend to go down?
But of course none of this is really the point. To investors and powerbrokers the great appeal of stadium economics is that it so rarely functions like economics at all. Football fans do not behave like rational customers. Millions of people pay a significant portion of their increasingly stretched incomes to watch a football team mostly not win, for ever.
This blind loyalty, this guaranteed bottom line, is what makes football such an irresistible investment vehicle. But it also means the only way to secure the kind of exponential growth the modern investor demands is essentially to move these fans out, upgrade them, replace them with richer, less discerning consumers.
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On reflection, the giant roof seems to serve a social as a well as an architectural purpose. Traditionally the football stadium served as a kind of nucleus to its local community: generating concentric waves of buzz and footfall and revenue that would emanate out to the streets and cafes and pubs that surrounded it. The stadium makes money. The chip shop next to the stadium makes money. The pub behind the chip shop makes money. The community centre behind the pub charges £10 for parking.
The modern stadium-campus, by contrast, takes a more proprietary view of its role in the built environment: not simply the beating heart but the entire body. Everything from the chips to the pints to the parking is taken in-house. You work for us. Everything here is the property of Manchester United plc, exists entirely on our sufferance, and we built this roof to be sure.
And at the root of all this lies a pointed question. If all this development is such a nailed-on wealth generator, why are the Glazers not funding it themselves? Why are investment funds not clambering over each other to get involved in the Trafford Park rail freight relocation project? Why is Ratcliffe, a man who moved to Monaco in order to avoid paying the British exchequer an estimated £4bn in taxes, not putting his outrageous fortune where his muttering mouth is?
Because, of course, this was never about regeneration, and never will be. This is simply neoliberalism at play, carving up our cities for their benefit and expecting us to be grateful for footing the bill. Cut some jobs. Abolish ticket concessions. Raise season-ticket prices. Make a sad face while you’re doing it. Meanwhile, allow us to show you this irresistible investment opportunity. It’s a win-win. It’s easy money. You might even call it a distinctive presence on your local economy.
