Earlier today, Tuesday, the club revealed its plans to build a 100,000-seater stadium.
This will be the centrepiece of the regeneration of the Old Trafford area and it will be ‘the world’s greatest football stadium’.
Manchester United’s current stadium has served it ‘brilliantly’ for the past 115 years, but Sir Jim Ratcliffe, co-owner of Manchester United, says it has fallen behind the best arenas in world sport.
The new venue, which is estimated to cost around £2 billion, will be ‘contained by a vast umbrella’ and will shelter a new public plaza that is twice the size of Trafalgar Square.
It will be the tallest landmark in Manchester and will include three towers inspired by the Red Devils’ trident.
It will also feature a huge wraparound scoreboard, a three-storey museum and canal-side restaurants.
And it is hoped that the construction of the new stadium will take just five years instead of what should be 10.
In a video posted following the announcement, British architect Lord Norman Foster explained that this reduced timeline will be possible by using the network of the Manchester Ship Canal and ‘bringing it back to a new life’.
This means that parts of the new stadium could pass through south Warrington.
United plan to use the ship canal, a 36-mile-long waterway which links Manchester to the Irish sea via Warrington, to transport parts of the stadium to the existing Old Trafford site.
It could see the town's swing bridges brought into action on a much more regular basis.
Lord Foster said: “Normally a stadium would take 10 years to build. We halved that time, five years.
“How do we do that? By prefabrication, by using the network of Manchester Ship Canal, bringing it back to a new life.
“Shipping in components, 160 of them, Meccano-like. And then we rebuild the Old Trafford station, and that becomes the pivot, the processional way to the stadium, welcoming and at the heart of a new sports-led neighbourhood.
“It's walkable, it's well-served by public transport. It's endowed by nature. It learns from the past, it creates streets. It's a mix-use mini-city.”
The club says the new stadium and the wider regeneration project of the Old Trafford area have the potential to deliver an additional £7.3bn per year to the UK economy which brings large-scale social and economic benefits to the community and wider region, including the possible creation of 92,000 new jobs, more than 17,000 new homes as well as driving an additional 1.8 million visitors annually.
Sir Jim Ratcliffe, co-owner of Manchester United, said: “Today marks the start of an incredibly exciting journey to the delivery of what will be the world’s greatest football stadium, at the centre of a regenerated Old Trafford. “Our current stadium has served us brilliantly for the past 115 years, but it has fallen behind the best arenas in world sport. By building next to the existing site, we will be able to preserve the essence of Old Trafford, while creating a truly state-of-the-art stadium that transforms the fan experience, only footsteps from our historic home.
“Just as important is the opportunity for a new stadium to be the catalyst for social and economic renewal of the Old Trafford area, creating jobs and investment, not just during the construction phase, but on a lasting basis when the stadium district is complete. The Government has identified infrastructure investment as a strategic priority, particularly in the north of England, and we are proud to be supporting that mission with this project of national, as well as local, significance.”