Did we need to move from Ninian?

Over on the other board there was a good post by Heathblue asking this question. Trouble is it has been hijacked by the usual suspects and the orginal point has been lost whilst they bicker.

But it's a great question and I really think looking back that there was another option which we could have taken.

The council could have gifted us the land we could have sold the retail park to PMG for £35M and used that cash to up grade Ninian Park to a 25,000 all seater with all the corporate areas. Where our stadium is now, we could have built (or upgraded the old) athletic's stadium which the Eggers could have shared, thus saving the cost of the road works etc. We could have still built the car park and developed the Hotel and GRO sites with the income generated for the club.

The total cost of the new stadium is apparently £61m (according to the EGM) so the question has to be couldn't we just have re-developed Ninian Park and built the athletics/rugby park for £35m?

How would the stadium be upgraded?

Grandstand area in particular - aside from closing Sloper Road off , parts of Ninian Park didn't have room to expand into. Either impinging onto the road or backing onto houses behind the canton stand, for two.

It wouldn't be a job that could be done over summer - unless you mean simply putting seating into the terrace area - then you've the issue of not being able to immediately sell STs there as it's still being "built".

Hospitality facilities - again, a massive job to improve there at Ninian. Toilets et al?

You're looking at a lot of time and expense "upgrading" superficially - the infrastructure would still be abysmal, wasting money papering over the cracks.

We'd also have had to spend money renting another stadium at prohibitive cost.

And all that would happen would be that it would need to be redone in the future anyway.

I think the location of Ninian Park would prevent any real development. The new stadium not only brings better facilities but safer football given the route now for the away fans.

Ninian Park was falling apart the money on any developing would have just gone into a black hole. As much as I loved it as a ground the move was necessary for Cardiff City to have any kind of future (if we still have one).

as above

we had no alternative

simply couldnt raise enough income to keep going at ninian park as the facilities were so poor

upgrading the facilities ..rebuilding the ground ..would ahve had to be done over several years ..as other clubs who have stayed put have done

that would have meant surviving on crowds of less than 10000 ..even when we had the big games

blackpool and donny etc can just about do that ..but in the long term they dont have this huge debt so we had to make the move

its stupid spending and failure to sell players when we were offering them to the world thats got us in the mess