One time Premiership club Bradford City may have to leave Valley Parade and ground share with rugby league outfit Bradford Bulls at Odsal. While such ground sharing arrangements with rugby teams have an economic rationale and are increasingly being resorted to as cost pressures mount, egg chasing can cut up a ground badly.
One time Premiership club Bradford City may have to leave Valley Parade and ground share with rugby league outfit Bradford Bulls at Odsal. While such ground sharing arrangements with rugby teams have an economic rationale and are increasingly being resorted to as cost pressures mount, egg chasing can cut up a ground badly.
The Bantams have played at Valley Parade since 1903. They currently pay around £700,000 a year to the pension fund of former chairman Gordon Gibb and Prudential Property Investment Managers (PRUPIM). After their relegation from the Premiership in 2001, the ground was sold to the pension fund of Gibb for around £2.5m and subsequently rented back to the club.
Bradford also rent their offices next to the ground from PRUPIM which together with other costs means the League 2 club have to find almost £1.3m a year. Earlier this month the club were a week late in paying their quarterly rent.
The Prudential property arm are talking to the club, but the other landlords have told them to go through their solicitors and have so far received no response. The club’s position is not that the rent has to be reduced drastically, but that it needs to be reduced in League 2.
Joint chairman Mark Lawn commented, ‘There’s no investors coming into Bradford City, not while the overheads are where they are because it’s killing us down at this level.’ The situation is complicated by the fact that they would have to get out of a lease which has 17 years to run.
The Bantams spent 18 months at Odsal following the tragic Valley Parade fire in 1985.