This ridiculous St James’ Park or new stadium question – Reality check | OneFootball

St James’ Park or a new stadium is back top of the agenda.

Fans and media discussing this on Thursday.

This follows an event on Wednesday night at the Newcastle United fanzone, opposite St James’ Park.

The club sent out an email to season ticket holders and members, inviting for them to apply for a limited number of (free) tickets to attend the event.

That event was attended by Newcastle United CEO Darren Eales, along with the other senior business-side figures employed by the Newcastle United owners.

The club themselves decided which questions were answered, with these questions having had to be ‘sent in’ before the event.

It has surely become obvious to pretty much everybody, that whilst other issues and areas of the club were discussed, this event was clearly arranged, solely to push on the St James’ Park or new stadium debate.

All of the NUFC journalists were invited and if you have any doubts about my claims of why the event was put on, just look at all the media articles today. I haven’t seen a single one that isn’t concentrating almost exclusively on the ‘St James’ Park or new stadium?’ part of what was said.

Which then brings me to this particularly ridiculous ‘St James’ Park or new stadium’ question.

You know the one, both journalists asking it, as well as fans posing the question to other fans, ‘What would you prefer, sticking with St James’ Park, or a brand new stadium?’

It is such a daft and pointless question.

How can you give an answer when you don’t know what either option is???

What would an added-to St James’ Park look like – how many more seats would it have, by how much would the capacity be cut whilst the work was going on, and for how long (one year, two years), if staying at SJP would it mean even more normal seating areas changed to corporate/hospitality in order to bring in the extra riches that could have been delivered by a much bigger state of the art brand new stadium?

The most ridiculous thing of all with the whole question, is that people are asking and answering it without any knowledge/information of where this brand new stadium would be situated.

It is a bit like somebody asking you if you would like to move from where you currently live, how can you answer that if they don’t tell you where exactly you will be living and in what kind of property?

So you might be living with your family in a two-bedroom flat in a canny area of Tyneside, but when asked if you want to make the move to another property, it could turn out to be anything from moving into a ten-bedroom mansion just across the street, right through to living in a cardboard box on Wearside.

What about the brand new stadium was actually exactly where St James’ Park is now?

Or say moved 50/100 yards so it is still covering much of the same area but completely rebuilt and shifted a little bit?

Or what about moving 200/300 yards or so and a brand new stadium built on Leazes Park/Castle Leazes?

Basically, this is the kind of thing that has happened at Tottenham, a new stadium built in almost the same spot, just moved a little bit. If Spurs hadn’t built their far bigger brand new state-of-the-art stadium, they would have been knackered. They would have had zero chance of competing towards the top end. The same with Arsenal if they had stayed at Highbury, they could never have expanded that to anything close to what they needed, they moved a little bit further than Tottenham but only by hundreds of yards.

Surely what we all want as Newcastle United fans, is to stay in a city centre location in the same general area that is still within the same kind of walking distance to the city center businesses and transport links etc, BUT also allows tens of thousands more fans into matches AND massively helps NUFC to close the gap financially on the usual suspects.

Of course, we all have an emotional attachment to St James’ Park BUT if we are honest, the St James’ Park we see now, is nothing like the St James’ Park we first started going to. Assuming you haven’t just very recently started going to St James’ Park.

If you first went to St James’ Park in the early 1970s, then not a single thing is in any way recognisable.

The reality is that what we see now is a brand new stadium, compared to what was there before the ‘new’ East Stand was built on the ‘popular side’ of St James’ Park.

A bit before my time but it must have been class standing on that popular side terracing. I remember going to Maine Road in the 1980s and it was class when they put the Newcastle fans at the side of the pitch, in the Kippax, which also had a roof I seem to recall.

What I did experience and was absolute class, was standing in the old Leazes End as a kid in the 70s, just how exciting was that???

Once they knocked that down, for me, St James’ Park was never the same again.

Talk of how it would never be the same if we moved from St James’ Park, even if just a couple of hundred yards away, is just nonsense.

The SJP of my youth no longer exists. It is what it is now and I just accept it for what it is. Not a patch on those exhilarating days of the mid-1970s but this is where we are at now.

If a magic button could be pressed and we could have an 80,000+ capacity St James’ Park in exactly the same spot AND that old Leazes End with the roof and all old school standing was recreated exactly the same to be part of it, then that would be my absolute dream.

However, that is just my nostalgia and won’t happen, the same as the nostalgia shouldn’t be accommodated of those currently who would rather keep everything as it is now, rather than countenance any major change, any major move, even if it is only 200 yards away.

If the Newcastle United owners want to finance and build a brand new state-of-the-art 80,000+ capacity ‘New St James’ Park powered by Adidas (or some other stadium sponsor) 200 yards away, that would help send us up to a whole new level financially and allow NUFC to compete on and off the pitch, then it would get my vote every time.