Time to question Milne’s doomed vision of Pittodrie
READERS in Aberdeen would be advised to batten down the hatches and lock the doors. The chairman of the local football club has warned there could be dark days ahead.
Unless Aberdeen get their new £40million stadium on the other side of the city at the third time of asking, Stewart Milne is blunt; the game is up.
Milne wants it built by 2020 and has embarked on his very own Project Fear to make it happen. Aberdeen, he claims, will be in a ‘difficult situation’ unless it goes ahead.
The club would no longer be able to play in Europe. And the loss of proposed state-of-the-art training facilities would chase away manager Derek McInnes.
He stopped just short of predicting famine, disease or a plague of locusts over the Granite City. But we got the picture.
Much of this is dubious scaremongering.
For any football manager, worrying about the next six months — never mind the next four years — is the limit of their horizons. It’s difficult to recall a coach leaving a club complaining bitterly about a planning decision.
Directors are different. There are clearly reasons why Aberdeen’s board want to leave Pittodrie.
The old main stand is crumbling and it would cost a fortune to rebuild it. The capacity would be slashed by safety concerns. By moving to the new spacious site, they can kill two birds with one stone by building new training facilities, as well.
The concept seems sound in principle. But the devil is in the detail — and, right now, that’s non existent.
It’s far from clear where the £40m would come from for a start.
Selling Pittodrie would cover some of it. Outline planning permission was granted for housing in April 2011.
But the planners are being less accommodating when it comes to the new stadium. Aberdeen have been foiled and frustrated at every turn.
A previous flit to Kingswells was booted out by planners after a rebellion by the Not In My Backyard brigade (NIMBYs). An alternative site at Loirston Loch suffered the same fate.
There is absolutely no guarantee they will have better luck this time. Until they do, the glossy new stadium plans look like pie in the sky.
This may be the reason Milne is resorting to increasingly desperate persuasion tactics.
Like a modern-day Private Fraser, he offers a bleak vision of the future. Unless Aberdeen make this move, he insists, the club is doomed.
And, if it means giving up 100 years of history at Pittodrie to move to football’s equivalent of the out-oftown retail park, so be it.
Usually, supporters resist this stuff. But Aberdeen fans are showing a curious reluctance to ask hard questions of their chairman.
Few appear to be asking whether their traditional home — close to the city centre, perfectly functional, and a proper football stadium — really is beyond salvation.
But they should be. Because we have heard all this stuff before.
In his days as a vastly unpopular Hearts chairman, Chris Robinson once branded Tynecastle ‘not fit for purpose’. He wanted to flatten it, move to a vast, empty Murrayfield, wipe out the debt and turn a national treasure into flats.
But Hearts fans kicked up merry hell. It was nonsense then and it still is.
The very antithesis of Robinson, Ann Budge, listened to fans and made the decision to remain at the club’s spiritual home.
And a £12m rebuild of the main stand will soon make the Gorgie arena one of the very best in the country.
Hearts had the will and, under the admirable Budge, they found the means.
Milne might at least consider whether his own supporters might like him to do the same.
Pittodrie is an iconic venue. A proper football stadium. If nostalgia is all Scottish football has left, then here is a ground which offers it in spades.
It doesn’t seem to rouse the same passions amongst locals as the Boleyn Ground (Upton Park to you and me). But it really should.
In its day, it hosted magnificent days and nights. Knocking Celtic and Rangers off their bloody perch under Alex Ferguson. Humbling the mighty Bayern Munich.
It’s 10 minutes walk from Union Street, has perfectly good transport links and hosts a famous football club. Aberdeen belong there. Stewart Milne disagrees. Publicly, Scotland’s wealthiest homebuilder looks at Pittodrie and sees a bleak future. Aberdeen supporters might care to ask sometime soon if what he really sees is a great site for building flats.