The idea of expanding Elland Road has been floated for many years but the 49 Enterprises seem serious about it.
Paraag Marathe and co. wish to upgrade the stadium to hold 53,000 spectators when all is said and done, with work concentrated on the West Stand as well as the South Stand and North Stand. Obviously, this won’t be a quick job.
“There will probably be a couple of phases that ultimately take us to 53,000,” Leeds United chairman Marathe said last month. The 49ers chief told fans to expect further updates in due course, with timescales and start dates not yet clear.
He added: “We want to do it without compromising seats over the next couple of years. So it’s going to be a bit tricky but that’s our goal and we’re ploughing forward on all fronts.”
Clearly, that will elongate the process, but that is a price most will be willing to pay. Sanctioning a reduced capacity of the current 37,890 seating is not only less than ideal but actually unhelpful.
“Elland Road is a place that players and managers from other clubs don’t like playing at because it’s been called a cauldron or a hurricane of noise,” Marathe noted. Some of that would be lost if part of the ground was closed.
So how long will it take? At this early stage, all the variables make it hard to pin down but we can conjure an estimation from previous examples from elsewhere.
Starting with the most high-profile domestic case of recent years, Liverpool’s Anfield Road stand saw the ground’s capacity stretch by 7,000 to around 61,000. Work began in September 2021 and took nearly two-and-a-half years to complete, officially opening in February 2024.
Manchester City’s earlier completion of their South Stand expansion was quicker, with work starting in April 2014 and being finished by the summer of 2015. Now, the club is currently extending their North Stand, which will take a bit longer.
Construction for an extra 8,000 seats began in 2023 and will not be completed by August 2025 at the earliest. Of course, these are top-end Premier League teams, so what about the EFL?
Wrexham are rebuilding the Kop Stand, having demolished the abandoned and unused former structure in 2023. The new stand will house 5,500 seats and is currently under construction. The hope is that it will formally open in 2026.
That project is clearly quite different to the one at Elland Road, given Wrexham and their Hollywood owners are resurrecting a whole new stand. What’s also important to note is the jump in capacity.
For Elland Road, the first phase alone would see the ground bounce up to a capacity of 47,000 - nearly a 9,000 seat jump. That increases to an almost 15,000-seat rise when all is said and done.
Brentford’s new home - the Gtech Community Stadium - has an overall capacity of 17,250 and that took three years to complete. Obviously this is majorly different in that a totally new venue was built in a new chalked-off, inaccessible piece of land.
Bear in mind that Elland Road will still be operational during works, and it throws a new light on the size of the expansion task. Marathe did say the operation would be “a bit tricky”.
But the 49ers did construct the 70,000-seater Levi’s Stadium in San Francisco for its NFL franchise in 2014 - a project that cost $1.3billion and took just two years to finish. So the 49ers has history with stadium infrastructure.
Elland Road presents a different kind of challenge given it is an expansion of a current structure, and that is why it is so difficult to predict timeframes.
Going from previous examples as a loose barometer, if all works are completed within three years, that’s some going.
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