Do you not know that if that Sal took over instead in 1996 he'd have replaced all the stands with newer modern ones before 2000 and continuously recruited and maintained the best squad ever every season running for the last 20 years winning many more titles than we have done.

Dream Keyboard CEO

The stadium exists in the context of a rugby league club, not in a vacuum where the stadium and only the stadium exists. Since GH has taken over the club has significantly increased attendances, revenue, profits and success. It’s also developed large areas of the stadium including the pavilion, club offices, banqueting suites, club shop, hotel, Kirkstall training ground and of course the Carnegie Stand. This ontop of putting the club on sound financial footing from a position of significant debt and near bankruptcy.

How could anyone consider that stagnation?

.....yeah but...the wooden seats!

I like the wooden seats. Or used to when I sat there 30 years ago. Are they any worse than they were, as most plastic ones at stadia are rubbish even if they are newer.

I am not suggesting for one minute that GH has done a bad job he hasn't - my point is you can spend all the money on the offices, the shop etc. you can get Carneige to build you a new stand etc. that is all good.

The point I was making is simply the facilities that generate the vast majority of the income have been the last place where money has been spent. 3/4s of the stadium is an embarrassment for a top sporting club. You have to take the stadium in the context of entertainment not just RL as Leeds are not just competing for RL money - if you went to the Theatre and you paid the top price I doubt you would be very happy to sit in wooden seats from the 1930s.

Firstly Carnegie didn't build Leeds a stand, as you misleadingly imply in your attempt to pretend that the club hasn't spent money on the stadium - Leeds built that stand out of their own funds. The Carnegie sponsorship and use of the facility made the sums add up even more but they didn't provide the initial cash to build it, that came from Leeds own reserves, bloated at the time by the sale of the cricket ground.


Secondly, your argument would have more merit if it didn't ignore the fact that the very first piece of stadium improvement the club made after Hetherington's arrival was the complete refit of the South Stand in 1999 when £1m was spent fitting the brand new roof (unlike other old stands at other old grounds it never leaked after that) provided the TV gantry and studio and refitted the bars and toilets with modern facilities. There were no river caves at Headingley.


But it is a ridiculous position to suggest that a club which generated in the late '90s around £7m a year of turnover, had a bit of historic debt and was just starting to be borderline profitable should have launched into a £20m wholesale rebuild of the ground straightaway. Initially the whole focus was on stabilising the business and to Leeds that meant securing both the test cricket and Yorkshire's future at the ground. So the company spent a lot of money on that side of the stadium which had the added bonus of further extending the corporate space for RL games.


And then, yes, the big investment in the Carnegie Stand which you so casually dismiss. A huge, huge development in the history of the stadium. And one which was possible by classic Hetherington/Caddick nous: first ensuring YCCC stayed at the ground, then ensuring it retained test match status by redevloping the East Stand and old West terrace, then once that was done selling it to the cricket club for £13m or whatever it was.


Anyway as it stands Leeds have spent more than any club other than Saints and Warrington on ground improvements in the Hetherington era. And will blow both of those out of the water in the next 12 months. It's not been easy or swift - but that's because the club chose to redevelop their existing ground and no external party be it supermarket or council or club owner was willing to pay for it - so it's 100% self funded, unique in British RL. Thanks Hetherington.

Very well and eloquently put!
We were in deep mire when Caddick and Hetherington took control,we have out performed every other side in the last ten years and will soon have by far the best,wholly owned by the club,stadium in SL,stagnation?

We had new posts put in and the pitch re-laid too remember?

And a large screen erected!

I tip my hat to you my friend.

Some people forget how far this club has come in the last 20 years. I for one will never criticise Mr H. He isn't perfect but he's given me some of the best times of my life. Bit like the wife but it's fun criticising her

Stop talking sense Ghost, it's not wanted by the Rhinos Bashers Club. Please concentrate your replies on the "wooden seats" debacle!

Here's the outline of the proposed temporary North Stand (red) with the existing stand (blue) and the replacement stand (grey). Looks a rinky-dink affair.

This view also shows the effects of the large loss of capacity on the RL side in the final scheme, a very disappointing outcome for the amount of money being spent. Our stadium actually gets smaller with a capacity post-rebuild of less than 20,000. This is all being lost on the North Stand side, as seen here, where the central core of the building and its huge banqueting suite takes out around 2,000 of the seats in the existing stand. I also worry that it will be a rather windswept place to sit compared to the existing place.

Compared to the cricket side which as the planning docs suggest is intended to be individual in character our side is by design supposed to be altogether more perfunctory in nature.



Given that it is common for redeveloped and new stadia to drive increases in attendance it's of concern that the club has had to settle for a smaller ground as part of a trade-off with the needs of the corporate and cricket sides. There is literally nowhere else to grow the ground after this - if we thought getting planning for this scheme was convoluted I'd like to see what happened if the club put forward a scheme for the Western Terrace.

Very interesting, on balance it looks like it favours the corporate, prawn /smoked salmon brigade . I have lost track over the years with regards to the twists and turns of the ground ownership and links between the cricket and rugby sections. I remember years ago talk about the cricket moving to a greenfield site , durkar?. Obviously that would have given us free rein to develop the north stand purely for rugby purposes.
Seem also to remember a school of thought to sell off the whole lot and move the rugby side to a new ground. As before the western terrace is the fly in the ointment regarding completing the ground development.

Reduced capacity after redevelopment not good

Agreed, however on the other side of the coin ,potentially more income from the corporate brigade. The transformation from the dark days of the back end of last season to last Saturday is remarkable. Add in the new ground developments plus the potential of young players like walker and Golding the future is starting to look extremely promising.

20,000 is more than adequate for the needs of the Rhinos.
We need to get attendances up around that mark after the redevelopment when we'll have a stadium to be proud of.
Reduced seating in the North stand offset by seats in the South Stand.

A pertinent point.

Anyone have the stats for seated capacity before/after?... I guess that is increasing?
Corporate increase goes without saying.

There's probably minimal scope to increase the ground's capacity to be honest. Planning applications in Headingley are always scrutinised more closely than other parts of the city, and that's certainly the case with a project of this nature. The club doesn't have the friendliest neighbours in the world, traffic and parking are already issues in Headingley on matchdays, and so anything that could increase that is going to come up against challenges.

With that in mind, the club only has two options if it wants to increase ticket revenue. It can either increase ticket prices (not popular) or you can increase the number of premium tickets that you can sell (which reduces capacity on the same site footprint, but increases revenue per ticket). I think in truth, the club is right to do the latter.

I agree to an extent but there would definitely have been scope for a more ambitious stand on the rugby side-the proposed one is quite a simple, single tier structure (ignoring the obvious complexities of the back to back roof structures) with the back of the multiple tiered cricket side towering above it like it did in the 1920s north stand.

Clearly this would have cost more money but then I do find it hard to believe we are spending £10m or so on our share of a north stand scheme which achieves a capacity on our side of less than 4,000. That £10m is not far off the total build price of Saints and Warrington's stadia.

How many games have we sold out in the last few years? Not many. The increase in corporate capacity will allow revenue to increase, which is far more important than the actual attendance figure.

Does the £10m figure include the cost of the Southstand? Or is it the total for the joint rugby and cricket stand? Surely it’s not the cost of the north stand to the Rhinos?

Achieved through a massive downsizing of the South Stand terrace, to be fair

The SS sells out for a lot of games, but the NS rarely does and the Carnegie always has loads of gaps in the seats. Will the non season ticket holding casual Southstanders be tempted onto the Western Terrace or into (relatively expensive) seats?

Has the North Stand begun to come down yet?

I think quite a large number of Southstanders will “upgrade” to the Southstand seats.