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Visitors to Salford’s Lowry art gallery this summer will be able to enjoy a new take on one of the greatest paintings about sport. Depicting thousands of supporters bent purposefully towards a 1950s football stadium, LS Lowry’s Going to the Match has become part of the iconography of the national game. As part of its silver jubilee celebrations, the gallery is staging an immersive experience of the painting, including a nostalgic soundtrack evoking the sounds of a lost world.
So much for the past. Barely a mile away from the Lowry, at Manchester United’s Old Trafford base, it is the ghosts of football’s future that are being summoned up. To great fanfare, this month the club unveiled computer-generated images of Lowryesque hordes approaching the new £2bn stadium it hopes to build by 2030.
Accommodating 100,000 fans, and topped by three spires that will allegedly be visible from Liverpool, “New Trafford” is set to be the biggest and costliest football arena in Britain. Somewhat improbably, United’s co-owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe has suggested that the stadium and its vast surrounding leisure campus could become a global draw on a par with the Eiffel Tower.
A project so gargantuan will undoubtedly be a catalyst for welcome economic growth in the wider Trafford area. The club is anticipating that substantial public funding can be unlocked to transform the stadium’s post-industrial hinterland. Enthusiastic noises from the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, suggest that a substantial amount of cash may be forthcoming. But there is already criticism that the scheme could boost a billionaire tax exile’s business at taxpayers’ expense.
The 2012 London Olympics demonstrated what sporting-led regeneration projects can achieve. But Manchester United supporters’ organisations, with good reason, are ambivalent about this brave new world. In the same week the initial stadium design was revealed, Sir Jim told interviewers that Britain’s biggest football club had been at risk of going bust by Christmas. This was alarmist talk to justify deeply unpopular ticket price rises and internal cost-cutting. But the club owes more than £700m, largely thanks to the leveraged takeover by the US Glazer family 20 years ago, which piled a mountain of debt on to a previously debt-free institution.
Funding one of the most expensive stadiums in world sport will ratchet up the financial pressure still further, and investors will demand handsome returns. The grim likelihood is that, one way or another, ordinary supporters end up footing the bill. Well-versed in the monetising ways of modern football, an already disillusioned fanbase will treat the club’s pledges of ticket affordability with understandable scepticism.
Ultimately, of course, the success of “New Trafford” will depend on what happens on the field of play. In a caustic assessment of the plans, the Manchester MP Graham Stringer recalled a visit in the 1960s to Sheffield Wednesday’s Hillsborough ground, which had been recently modernised. As the home team trailed, a disgruntled local commented acidly that he was “still waiting for the bloody cantilever stand to score a goal”.
In an age when elite football regularly shows signs of losing touch with the soul of the game, that nugget of northern wisdom offers a salutary reminder of core sporting priorities. As they dream of a “Wembley of the north”, while the men’s team continues to flounder on the pitch, the Glazers and Sir Jim should not lose sight of them.
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