What future for stadium after kick in the teeth for fans?
After the controversy over Gateshead’s exclusion from play-offs that could have seen them promoted to the Football League, DANIEL HOLLAND looks at the issues surrounding the club’s home, Gateshead Stadium
THIS coming Sunday, excited fans will gather at Wembley to see if their team can be promoted from the National League to the Football League (EFL). But Gateshead fans will not be there after a bitter blow last Monday.
Heed fans were left devastated after their team was deemed ineligible for promotion to the EFL as the club could not meet a requirement to secure a 10-year lease on their ground, Gateshead International Stadium, which is owned and run by Gateshead Council.
It meant that their hard-earned play-off place disappeared within days of them securing it, leaving five other teams to fight it out to join Chesterfield in being promoted. Solihull – who Gateshead should have played in the first round of the play-offs – and Bromley will contest that match at Wembley.
Last week’s drama marks the latest development in a cost-cutting saga over Gateshead’s leisure services.
Two leisure centres elsewhere in the town have already been closed down and the future of the stadium, as well as Gateshead’s other remaining public sports facilities, remains unclear for the moment. But how did the situation reach this point?
WHY IS THE STADIUM’S FUTURE UNCLEAR?
Put simply, the Labour-run council says it can no longer afford to run the stadium and its other leisure centres at a time when it is facing a £50 million budget shortfall over the next five years and escalating social care costs. Gateshead Leisure Centre and Birtley’s swimming pool were shut down last summer for the same reason, while the stadium is among the remaining leisure sites across the town that the council is seeking to contract out to a private operator.
The council had set out in 2015 to make its leisure services self-sustaining by 2020, but failed to achieve this and in fact saw deficits widen significantly as Covid-19 and the cost of living crisis hit. Critics have accused the council of not acting quickly enough to secure the future of its leisure centres and allowing the situation to deteriorate, particularly at a time when other North East authorities like Northumberland have been building new leisure centres.
Figures obtained by The Journal show that subsidising Gateshead International Stadium has cost the council £4.2 million over the last five years, including £913,000 in 2023/24, which civic centre bosses argue is unsustainable amid a backdrop of continuing cuts that have already seen them slash £191 million since 2010.
The council has cautioned that the stadium is in need of £4 million of repairs over the next decade and, with operating costs added to that, it will cost the council at least £11 million to keep open in that time. A report to the authority’s cabinet last year warned that there is “no current funding source that the council may access to meet this potential liability” and that the authority “would experience financial difficulties in retaining any offer” at the stadium.
WHEN WILL A NEW OPERATOR BE IN PLACE – AND WILL THERE DEFINITELY BE ONE?
The council launched a procurement exercise in February to find an
external operator to take over the borough’s remaining leisure sites in Blaydon, Heworth, and Dunston, with the option of them taking over the stadium as well. Two lots have been put out to tender, one which includes the stadium and one which does not.
A decision to appoint a contractor is expected to be brought back to the cabinet this September, with that new operator expected to be handed the keys to the centres by February 2025 at the latest. While it is not known who will be bidding, sources have told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that the council has held talks with companies with experience of running both leisure centres and stadiums.
There is a confidence within the civic centre that the commercial opportunities presented by the stadium will make it attractive to leisure firms interested in bidding. But there is no guarantee at this stage that a new operator will definitely be found and it is that uncertainty that has been a problem for the EFL.
WILL A NEW OPERATOR OF THE LEISURE CENTRE BE OBLIGED TO KEEP GATESHEAD FC AS A TENANT?
Gateshead Council says it agreed to give the football club a 10-year licence at the stadium if they gained promotion – but, crucially, this would have included a break clause whereby the club would negotiate new terms if the operation of the stadium does indeed transfer to a new operator, as it is expected to. The Local Democracy Reporting Service understands that the council has not offered to make it a condition of any future leisure operator’s contract that Gateshead FC must be retained as a tenant.
A source indicated that the council’s expectation is that any future operator would want to retain the football club’s presence, given its importance to the community and its potential to generate significant revenue for the venue. The EFL is known to have wanted a more formal and legally binding agreement to satisfy its condition that clubs gaining promotion from the National League must have 10 years’ security on a stadium.
IS THE STADIUM AT RISK OF CLOSURE?
The prospect of closing the stadium came up in late 2022 when it first emerged that some leisure centres were at risk of being shut down. Gateshead Council excluded the stadium from the sites put at risk, on the basis that it was a unique asset built to host international events and having a “wider and significantly different offer” to the town’s other facilities.
But the GMB union argued that the stadium needed to be considered for closure too, calling it a “white elephant” that was of less benefit to local residents’ health and wellbeing and was “being allowed to plod on indefinitely whilst vital services will be decimated”.
While the council’s view on the importance of the stadium is unchanged, the appointment of a private operator will be key to its future. If the council fails to find an operator, there will be major doubts over how long it could continue to run the stadium itself – hence why it has been unable to offer a cast-iron guarantee to the EFL.
SAT in the car last Tuesday afternoon, I read that Jenny Dillon had died. You won’t know her, won’t have heard of her. I haven’t seen Jenny for years, only rarely communicating through social media. She lived where we met, 150 miles away in Lancashire and I knew she was ill, because she hadn’t been able to come to my book launch, last October in Lancaster.
I was devastated by the news of her death. Jenny was a wise woman, a determined advocate for children’s rights and a selfless, committed social worker for hundreds of young people whom she looked after in residential care for decades. I feel that the whole world is diminished, now that she’s no longer here.
If the world had any idea of what it has lost.
Everybody has a story to tell. I know, because I tell someone’s tale at their funeral almost every week. I talk to bereaved relatives, ask questions, draft together contributions, memories, sometimes encourage people to speak their own words, to stand up in front of others on a sad day. Or, after drafting and checking and re-drafting, I just present it myself.
I think it’s an important part of a process of enabling people to come to terms with grievous loss, to feel that important things have been said. That a loved one has been served well, whether quite privately, or in public, sometimes to a packed room.
Last week, someone told me that being a celebrant must be a ‘terrible job.’ In a way, I know what they meant because you have to be sensitive to people’s distress, while not allowing it to overwhelm you. I try to manage this by not taking many funerals on and by having other things, quite unconnected, to do. However, far from being a ‘terrible job’ I think this might be the best job I’ve ever done. I’ve now conducted more than 400 funerals and spoken at several others.
I think it’s important. I took it on, sought out the training to do it, because I’d been to a couple of funerals of friends and family members which didn’t do them justice. Thinking ‘I could do that’ mixture of listening and talking, writing and public speaking. You’re supposed to be helpful, there’s no point in doing it, if you’re not. If you can capture the person, in ways which people recognise, if you can put over their story with light and shade and feeling, people usually consider that you’ve done your job well.
Everybody is different. I’ve conducted funerals in people’s homes, in sports halls, in community rooms, at gravesides on fine days and a couple of times with the rain literally washing away my script as I read it. On most occasions you get half an hour or so at a crematorium. However you can say a great deal in a short time and there is always scope to vary the format and incorporate people’s own ideas. To be creative in your response to family members.
I’ve now done this job part-time for 11 years, longer than anything else. It has been a profound learning experience. My former profession of social work teaches you unconditional positive regard for every human being, this one brings contact with love, with close relatives and friends at a time of loss and when perspectives are changing. Everybody is to be valued, everybody is important, everybody matters.
I’m a civil funeral celebrant, so it’s the beliefs of the person and the family which are important, not mine. However, the work has certainly strengthened my faith in people, in the qualities of those of whom no-one outside a small circle has ever heard, of the capacity of each and every one of us to be bigger than we might seem, of our ability to grow, of the power of love.
I often wish I’d met the person whom I’m talking about so easily. Like some version of ‘This is Your Life’ why can’t we make occasions to say wonderful things about people when they’re still alive? Actually, even long after funerals there are still other things to do. My father died at 56, but we celebrated ‘Harry’s Hundredth’ and produced a booklet and toured some of the places of his life with the grandchildren who never knew him, on his centenary
I sometimes wonder what families do with the scripts. Occasionally people attending the funeral come up and ask me for my copy and, embarrassed at all the underlining, I duly hand them over. Funerals are usually public occasions, so I suppose these are public documents, they are certainly family history. In fact people’s stories are the gold dust of community family history, but it’s only apparently in Newbiggin by the Sea, where we collect such treasure for future generations www.newbigginbytheseacommunitytree
Women are writing on social media about how they trusted Jenny Dillon when they were thirteen and that she helped ‘turn around the lives of hundreds’. We mustn’t lose that rich legacy of how to work really well with young people, now Jenny has passed away.