The 49ers’ Elland Road puzzle: How to make a ground bigger without losing its soul — The Athletic 28/2/24

Phil Hay

In the carnage of Elland Road on Friday night, the noise from the stadium carried almost three miles away.

Over on the edge of Middleton Park, south of Leeds towards the M62 motorway, Maciek Goldyn, an 18-year-old mathematics student, was rushing home. He was on a night out for a friend’s birthday but had forgotten his ID and nipped back to get it.

When he reached his front door, he heard the noise go up at Elland Road at the end of Leeds United’s 3-1 win over Leicester City, the raw elation of a frenetic evening audible from a long distance. Goldyn hung out of his bedroom window and took a video on his mobile, which rapidly went viral on Twitter.

“Where I live, you can hear the ground occasionally, like when last-minute goals go in,” he says, “but it’s never been as loud as that. If you look at a map, my house is about 2.4 miles away so it’s not next door either.

“I’d normally have been at the game but I was out for a mate’s birthday and I needed my ID to go clubbing. On the bus home, you know what it’s like — everyone’s watching the game on their phones and Archie Gray’s goal while we were travelling. When I heard the noise coming from Elland Road, I thought, ‘I’ve got to film this’.”

Much closer to the coal face, in the upper tier of Elland Road’s West Stand, most of Leeds United’s hierarchy, the main men from 49ers Enterprises, looked on as the madness played out. The club’s owners turned out in numbers for the biggest game of the season and though vice-chairman Rudy Cline-Thomas was absent, the directors’ box filled up with recognisable faces: Paraag Marathe, Peter Lowy and the club’s new chief operating office, Morrie Eisenberg, a man whose remit revolves heavily around redeveloping a relic of a stadium.

The 49ers will never have experienced Elland Road as it was on Friday, so wild and explosive, and you know that because some supporters leaving the ground afterwards were talking about the fiercest atmosphere they had seen in 20 years.

There is something intangible about Elland Road’s ability to make teams melt; sometimes on its own but, far more often, opposition sides who lose their marbles as the crowd around them lose their heads. Enzo Maresca got a full initiation as Leicester, having held Leeds in the palm of their hand in the second half, capitulated to the point of being obliterated. An equaliser was all it took. “In the last 10 minutes, in this stadium…” Maresca said, and he is not the first visiting coach to have found himself muttering a sentence like that.

Over the weekend, a separate Twitter user to Goldyn tweeted about Leeds being “the last great old-school football club”. Some would contest that, and Nottingham Forest stand out as another grand club who are behind the curve of the sport’s commercial obsession, but a quick look around the Premier League and the Championship shows Elland Road to be one of the country’s last great old-school venues — though one that is very much ear-marked for change.

Where Elland Road is concerned, Leeds are caught between two stools — of knowing and accepting that, financially, their stadium does not work for them, but realising clubs cannot buy or manufacture an atmosphere.

It is hard to get away from the feeling that United will be diminished if an upgraded home does not retain a certain amount of its edge. English football is littered with examples of clubs trading unique, iconic stadiums for modern, custom-built grounds: Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur, West Ham United, Manchester City. West Ham have struggled more than most with the reality of swapping Upton Park in the bustling streets of London’s East End for the sanitised London Stadium.

Redevelopment plans for Elland Road have been in the ether for four or five years, without ever proceeding to the planning-application stage. The club’s former owner, Andrea Radrizzani, was in charge when architectural images of how an ungraded Elland Road might look were first created but he lacked the financial muscle to make the project happen alone. For as long as it was a minority shareholder, the 49ers Enterprises group was not prepared to commit itself to an expensive rebuild of an arena that it had limited control over. It was only when the 49ers’ 100 per cent buy-out of Radrizzani went through officially in September that ownership of Elland Road went with it — but by then, Leeds had lost their Premier League status again.

Major alterations to Elland Road have long been dependent on Leeds holding top-flight status and, more to the point, having confidence in their ability to retain it indefinitely. Had they avoided relegation last season, a post-takeover 49ers Enterprises group might have pushed the project on by now, though securing planning permission from the council could take up to 12 months. The club’s chief executive, Angus Kinnear, told The Square Ball podcast in September that the money behind the 49ers would make stadium development more feasible than it had been under Radrizzani.

“That will evidence itself in the ability to kickstart the stadium project so that when we do get back promoted, everything is in place to move that forward more quickly,” Kinnear said. Discussions have already taken place about bank loan facilities, and at least one major stadium company has been actively engaged in talks. Eisenberg, a long-time associate of the 49ers’, came on board as COO in November, with Leeds saying his responsibilities would involve “longer-term strategic initiatives, including the initial stages of our stadium redevelopment plans”.

In capacity terms, Leeds’ stadium is not big enough. It holds 36,000 and has been selling out consistently for the best part of a decade. United’s reluctance to expand in the Championship comes down to two things: the basic cost in a division where promotion is such a big and immediate priority, and the acceptance that if they got stuck at that level for any prolonged period, attendance figures would be at risk of dwindling.

There were suggestions that 49ers Enterprises would publicly outline fixed ideas for stadium development before Christmas but no announcements have been forthcoming. A long season-ticket waiting list built up during Marcelo Bielsa’s reign as head coach, proving that the demand for seats was extremely high. That waiting list stands at 22,000.

The 49ers group has categorically ruled out the option of a move away from the Elland Road site, Leeds’ home since they were founded in 1919. In 2014, the San Francisco 49ers NFL franchise moved from Candlestick Park to Levi’s Stadium many miles south in Santa Clara, a controversial switch in which Marathe and Eisenberg were heavily involved. The intention at Leeds is to revamp all sides of Elland Road except the East Stand — previously upgraded in 2011 — starting with the West Stand over one season. United want a final capacity of around 55,000.

While Levi’s Stadium has not been unanimously popular with 49ers followers, the infrastructure and technology within it is extremely modern, and its commercial performance is crucial to the running of the franchise.

After 49ers Enterprises first invested in Leeds, back in 2018, Kinnear took some of their representatives down into one of Elland Road’s concourses at half-time of a game for what he called the ‘three p’s’: a pint, a pie and a piss. Typically, he told them, you would have enough time for two of the three. The corporate facilities, old and needing improvement, were alien in comparison to what NFL venues offered, and at odds with most Premier League stadiums too. Commercially, Leeds could not ignore the facts: in a typical English campaign, Elland Road would earn them around £20million ($25.4m). Tottenham’s new home, a £1billion build, earned Spurs five times as much.

That disparity speaks for itself in a sport where money drives success. But Friday posed a dilemma for 49ers Enterprises and those who will oversee a future development project at Elland Road. How to change the ground without changing it? Or how to change the bricks, the mortar and the rough-and-ready appearance without sacrificing its soul? How to make sure increased commercial income does not mean Elland Road loses its gift for rattling the opposition, or is no longer heard in the streets many miles away? How to retain those roots?

At the heart of this challenge is the very nature of the way Leeds sees itself, as a club, a fanbase and a city. To appreciate the mindset, look no further than the defunct international pool that was built a mile or so from Elland Road in the 1960s. A failure of a project, it closed in 2007 and became derelict. One day, the “Welcome to Leeds” banner at one end of the pool was graffitied. “Welcome to Leeds,” it read. “Now f*** off. Thank you.” That was the hospitality shown to Leicester on Friday. And intangible though the evolution of an atmosphere can be, Leeds would be half the animal they are without theirs.