Time for Boldness

I haven't paid too much attention to the detail as I am an old cynic who will believe it when I see it. If the architect says that the stadium can't be developed further once built then send the designs back until he provides one that does.

It would be great to have a stadium that hosted football, American football, cricket, Rugby, concerts, retained a great atmosphere and be the envy of the league. We can dream anyhow.

There's no point going for less in today's premiership climate , 60 000 puts us on the map.

Anything less leans towards a club below the top level.

Ps ; sorry about the ‘floating' pun , it was unintentional!

The road Moshiri & most Blues want to take will still leave us potless & continue to be just a afterthought for a global audience.

To the Winners go the spoils !.

My reasons were manifold, think big and positively, and get the right Management and Team members in place, and the success will surely follow.

I also like the idea of being able to host other sporting and non-sporting events, which will bring a revenue in to the Club too.

Robles (last game)

Kenny (great prospect)
Keane (improving)
Funes Mori (decent & goal threat)
Baines (we all love him)

Klaassen (needs to start)
Baningime (yeah... instead of Gana)
Garbutt (still rate him... ok)

Vlasic (floating role, hard to mark)

Walcott (he's always wanted to play up top)
Tosun (Main Man & this time would have a strike partner)

No doubt Peter Lee & others will be shaking their heads in disbelief... lol. Fuck it, I'm past caring. I just want something fucking different for once.

If you build a 50,000 seater and fill it every week, you create a bear pit and have more "guaranteed" revenues - knowing the place will sell out.

While we are busy blowing the neighbors, The Red Sox have a capacity in Fenway of just under 40,000. They have an amazing game day experience and play to a packed house every night in the summer.

I'd follow the Red Sox model. Nothing looks worse than an empty or spotty upper deck playing Huddersfield in a near meaningless game.

Keep it full. Keep it rockin'. That's good business. It's not always about the hypothetical numbers because the assumption you'll actually get 60,000 every game is an.,.,.,..,. assumption!

6/7 games to glory...or
38 games to more misery...time to choose Blues !.

"It seems a long time ago that 𧹈m was the ballpark figure. Then, it became 𧾦m and 𨀊m, and now, nobody would be surprised if it reached a billion. Tottenham have taken out 𧹈m in bank loans, which are repayable over a five-year period. This month they announced in their financial results for the year ended 30 June 2017 that the “cumulative spend” on the project had increased from 𧴫.3m to 𧷳.1m. The club's profits were robust. They stood at 㿕.2m after interest and tax. But whichever way you dress it up, there is a lot of money to find. It is no wonder chairman Daniel Levy “struggles to sleep at night”, according to Pochettino."

Before we start getting "bold" we had better make sure we're not bankrupting the club or starving the manager, whoever it turns out to be, of funds to strengthen the side. Or we could find ourselves with the best stadium in the championship...or worse.

I'll go with the former,but YOU FOLKS knew I'd say that...if only Mosh thought the same way...jeez.

Oh to be there with thousands of Smiling Blues in the sun playing footy with the locals having bagged two pieces of Silverware that had eluded us for so long...yeah I know,I'll carry on dreaming of chasing a top four dream that leads to nowt but more wedge for Mosh,Bill & Co.

COYB

Good luck seeing how we had no wins verses the top six this season.

The real tragic thing is Mosh & the rest of us Blues share your wishes.

NOT ME !!!.

Oh to do 'em in Europe would be unreal,but unless we pull our fingers out & truly compete in the Cup competitions that dream will never be realized.

Maybe IF those fuckers bag their 6th European Cup,then mindsets on the Blue half might change,Cups are the key to OUR future success,a tangible sign of progress & hope for all of us going forward,23 years without a pot is a total discrace for a club of our stature & history & you all know it too !.

How many times do I have to say this?

What a Chairman...jeez.

Just 6/7 games needed from the lads to turn our frowns into Joker like smiles & it starts in mid September & ends at Wembley at Easter time.

I still believe in our club motto...more fool me !.

We need to win a trophy ASAP and the league cup at the moment is probably our best bet next season. 23, going on 24 years is a disgrace for our club not to win anything.So let's go all out to win it, get entry into the EL, win that and then guaranteed entry into the CL group stages.

With the option of expanding up to 70,000 in the future if needed.

Stop dreaming and be realistic, we are only going to sell huge numbers of tickets if we are successful on the pitch- winning trophies. Fact.

Yes we have a great history but that's all it is.

Both Arsenal and Man C have had good success over the years and struggle to fill their stadiums week in week out.

What chance do we have continually mediocre mid table? Seriously?

Be realistic please.

The Etihad, also a Meis design, wasn't built on a dock!!

On the "size envy" phrase from Meis, as he's designed a few big stadiums himself I take it that it's as a brief from the club for that 'low risk' option, particularly the CEO. It's bugger all to do with size envy more keeping up with your peers. As the Esk has said a few times these clubs are moving further away from us we can't afford to be so conservative (on and off the pitch) if we want to catch them.

We've had the lowering of our expectations almost in unison throughout the club it's about time (as soon as the season ends) that that ends and the club starts being bold and ambitious. In line with the motto.

Dan I think we'd struggle to fill a 500k stadium to be honest. 61878 has a ring to it.

They won Cup competitions first & then had the platform to truly compete for the League titles as most fans of theirs genuinely started to finally believe.

The Architect is saying 60k is the maximum .

The fans are saying 60k is the minimum.

So stop talking and build a 60k seat stadium.

Meis said the last 10K seats are the most expensive - especially if you don't build them at the same time as the rest of the stadium, I'd have thought!

But point taken.

I would have thought all the seats cost the same price. After all they are just bum shaped bits of plastic.

Tony #54 Not sure if that's tongue in cheek lol but, if not, what Meiss meant was they are the most difficult to sell and have a high staff to customer ratio.

I think blocking out the top tier / bowl looks so incredibly "bush league" I can't even begin to think of it as I'll get sick.

It basically says, "we can't get our own to fill up our stadium, don't mind the ugly tarps covering the seats."

John @ 37 -

The reason I favor a smaller stadium really is down to my Boston roots and Fenway Park. I realize nowadays the mention of anything Red Sox curls Everton toes. I was adopted blue before my world was turned upside down with the NESV acquisition of the poo. My sports world, ergo, is a living breathing hellish oxymoron.

Fenway is, by far, the single greatest stadium in America in my opinion. A Red Sox game is a religious experience - the intimacy of the place and the history are unlike anything else found in North America, bar Wrigley Field in Chicago. One of the reasons for that is the "smallness" of the stadium. John Henry and Co. purposely kept Fenway under 40,000 seats to keep the charm and feel. I've been there numerous times, and frankly I love it. The second you walk in you feel you're "at home" and part of a clan of sorts. And much of that is down to the architecture and the smaller footprint.

If we're going to spend a bazillion dollars on a stadium - and let's face it we have to - I'd prefer to have a more intimate, "we're home" kind of feel to it. And when a crowd gets rocking in a smaller stadium, you feel it in your bones. I detest empty seats - you simply ruin the flavor and intimidating feel of a venue.

Bear in mind, my opinion is simply a post on a fan site. The likelihood I actually get to Goodison / The Docks / an Everton game before I die I put at 50% tops. To that end, I'd absolutely defer to "the natives" in Liverpool. If they want 60,000 I sincerely hope they get it.

But I'd not discount a smaller stadium that can be filled game in and game out. Just my experience and my preference.

Second point: How do you prioritise a cup. I get playing your best team, but other than that?

New ground points. At the meeting with Dan Meis I attended I don't recall him giving a definitive figure on the max. capacity of the site, "around 60k" was mentioned. As I recall he was at pains to cover the restrictions which applied to the site, including the self-imposed orientation of the pitch. North-south was favoured, not compulsory. He was dismissive of expansion post- initial build. His reason was that if that flexibility is to be built in you have to build all of the supporting structures and services at the outset. This increases costs massively with no return. Trying to put the infrastructure in later was hideously expensive.

He said that he had a view about what a football stadium should "be". He thought, without saying what it was, that there was an optimum size for such a stadium. Without elaborating he said that Spurs new ground was " not a football stadium" but that if had been built in the States it would be appreciated as a great place for NFL.

All architects work to a brief and the client would have done some intensive market research or engaged him to have it done for them about what would optimise income to inform the brief.

One of the things that would have come out of that was the level of likely demand for executive boxes. The number of these in the drawings was quite small. There was a greater concentration on more flexible hospitality through better quality seating on the open stands with lounges/suites to back it up.

Like most I believe we could fill a larger stadium with a consistently successful team. Otherwise we could only do so as we are doing now, by keeping prices low.

We currently sell the maximum number of STs consistent with commitments to away fans. We do this largely on price and flexible payment options. Building a larger stadium and having to do the same to fill it makes no sense.

The club will have done their homework on numbers, demand and price across the range of possibilities. Before you queue to say "Oh yeh, but this is Everton" that data would be an essential part of any due diligence carried out by lenders including the council. The lack of proper financial projections, a failure to understand the certification process and no appreciation of timelines led to RBS pulling out of their loans to Liverpool when their new stadium was on the table. Indirectly it led to the sakecofctge club.

What we, as supporters, think, feel, desire, is irrelevant unless we are paying for the stadium with our own spare £500m.

Like other posters, I too wondered about restricting the build by not using all/part of Nelson dock to the south. Cost? I assume we got the BM option rather than bigger, already filled-in options further south because it was cheaper, insulating Peel's commercial developments from the sewage works.

As long as we have something to show for our efforts at season's end with a REAL chance of building on it...I'm happy, Peter.