Council could assist Leeds in switching to city-centre training ground

LEEDS CITY Council is to discuss the possible construction of a new city-centre training ground for Leeds United in a move that signals the club’s intention to move away from their Thorp Arch base.

The council’s board will meet next Wednesday, October 18, to review a recommendation that it opens talks with United about building a training complex and community sports village on two sites close to Elland Road.

An executive report submitted to the board has urged the council to engage United and the club’s owner, Andrea Radrizzani, over the relocation of the Leeds players and coaching staff from their current home near Wetherby.

Radrizzani, who took full control of the Championship club in May, has previously spoken about moving United’s training ground back into the centre of the city as part of wider plans to develop the land around Elland Road.

Council officials have identified the former site of Matthew Murray High School, which closed in 2006, on Brown Lane in Holbeck as a potential hub for United’s first team and academy players.

Officials also want to use the Fullerton Park land adjacent to Elland Road to create a Community Sports Village and a base for the Leeds United Foundation. Both pieces of land are council owned.

The council said the project would aim to provide Leeds’s academy with category 1 status under the Premier League’s Elite Player Performance Plan (EPPP), the highest grade attainable. United’s academy holds category two status at present.

Leeds’s complex at Thorp Arch was the brainchild of former manager Howard Wilkinson and opened in 1994. Leeds, however, sold the facility on a sale and leaseback agreement in 2004, raising just over £4m at a time when the club were facing mounting debts.

United pay an annual sixfigure rent in excess of £600,000, a sum which increases by three per cent annually. A buy-back clause on the property expired in 2009.

Thorp Arch is in the hands of Jacob Adler, the Manchester businessman who owned Elland Road until Radrizzani bought the stadium back for around £20m in June.

Leeds’s managing director Angus Kinnear said: “We thank Leeds City Council for their consideration.

“We have an ambitious vision for Elland Road and the surrounding area as a centre for elite development and a thriving community sports hub.”