Although the redevelopment of the Cobbold Stand at Portman Road is something that Ipswich Town want to look at soon, CEO and chairman Mike Ashton has revealed that another project will come first.
The Blues have spent a lot of money on bringing the stadium up to Premier League standards, and while there’s work still to be done in a few areas, Playford Road is the current priority after Ashton presented the designs to the club’s staff and first-team players earlier this year.
Even then, the redevelopment of the Cobbold Stand would leave 4,000 season-ticket holders without seats and nowhere to relocate them.
As a result, there could be another project that comes first, which would allow Town to maintain their current capacity at Portman Road.
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“Why? Because I’m certainly not going to take a stand down in the midst of a Premier League season. That’s just not the right thing to do, I don’t think.
“The next big infrastructure project will be the training ground. We’ll be in for planning in probably the next 10-14 days in regards to that. That’s the next key project, the training ground has waited long enough.
“We’ve spent three years, if you’d like, spending quite a lot of money upgrading Portman Road and bringing this beautiful stadium back to life. Again, on Saturday, huge thanks to the fans, because the way they conducted themselves pre-game was just magical. To see the stadium looking as good as it did was incredible.
“The training ground is the next project and we need to get underway with that pretty quickly.
“With regards to Portman Road and the Cobbold Stand, we’ve looked at a number of designs.
"We’ve had discussions with the local authority regards to the protection of land behind the current Cobbold Stand, so we know the base of the stand, how far we can go back and the capacity we can put in there.
“Your listener makes a huge assumption that the next piece of development at Portman Road is the Cobbold Stand.
“There’s a train of thought that says no. The next development there is the West Stand, which sees an increase in capacity of – surprise, surprise – circa 4,000 people. So when you take down the Cobbold Stand, people don’t lose their season ticket seats and they can move across.
“You can build behind, put that construction in place and then deal with the Cobbold Stand. Then you don’t lose your capacity.
“Someone said there, ‘will I find somewhere else to sit in the stadium?’. Well, no. Where? On the roof? We’re full! The seats don’t exist. We’ve got to try and be creative with how we do this.
“With regards to capacity, I’d love to see us get up to somewhere around 40,000. That feels like the right type of number. Beyond that might be too much and it might be difficult within the confines of the spaces we’ve got to do that.
“We’re working on it, but that’s a slow burner. It’s not a ‘now-now’ project. The urgent, important project is Playford Road.”
Asked about when we might see these projects at Portman Road come to fruition, Ashton admitted: “There’s no timescale on either, because honestly, the to-do list seems to grow every single day. Outside of the training ground, Cat One academy, the women’s team, the men’s team, I am slightly busy trying to keep this great club in the Premier League right now.
“We’ve got to keep our eye on the prize and not cut too thinly here with too many projects.
“It’s something that we’ll work through steadily. It’s on the weekly agenda list, we talk about it every single week and it steps forward when we look at things, what we’d do and how we’d do it.
“When I talk about the West Stand, that’s just a possibility, but the stadium has never been designed with a state strategy in place. Where the away fans are is awful, it’s not built for that and we’re actively trying to retrofit things all the time.
“We need have a longer-term strategy for people accessing and egressing the stadium. We need to give supporters the best matchday facilities and the best matchday hospitality that we possibly can.”
Ashton’s comments on upgrading the academy to Category One undoubtedly caught the attention of supporters. The club had applied for it back in 2013 but were unsuccessful. Now, with more money going into the club’s youth-level football, there’s a sense of optimism that it can get done within the next year or so.
“It’s always intriguing this, because it’s bigger to fans than it is to me,” Ashton laughed. “It isn’t as simple as that.
“You take Bristol City, the £100m+ of revenue that we built on trading academy players and Gary Probert [former academy manager at Bristol City, now Director of Football Operations at Ipswich] did from a Cat Two situation. We did the same at Watford.
“The games programme is key. We get a Premier League, Cat One games programme, we get bigger infrastructure and the costs are higher. But we still have to have the very best coaches, the very best recruitment and the very best infrastructure to develop young talent.
“We have made the strategic decision to move to Cat One. One of the reasons that we’ve done that is this location of the football club. One club county. We need to hoover all of the talent up in this county.
“I’m quite prepared to go to the other side of the border, you’ll know that. Both sides. If we go into London, we’ll do that, and if we go into the ‘land of those who shall not be named’, I’m happy to go to that side too.
“We’re in the process, we’ve just appointed Dmitri [Halajko], our new academy manager, who’s got experience in this and will take us forward.
“If everything went perfectly, we could do this within 12 months. If it doesn’t, it’ll go just beyond 12 months.”
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