AFC Bournemouth owner Bill Foley has announced that the Cherries intend to purchase Dean Court from stadium landlords Structadene and redevelop the ground as opposed to building a new Kings Park Stadium.
Dating back to 2022, before Foley was officially the owner of the Cherries, the American businessman had discussed two potential plans, redevelopment of the current stadium or building a new ground on the current training pitches in Kings Park.
Those very first revealed plans from Foley included a two-tier south stand, with a second-tier built on the Main Stand, boasting a capacity between 20,000 and 25,000.
In 2023, the two proposals were still very much in consideration, but the idea behind a new stadium appeared to be favoured due to the limitation on potential hospitality options at the current ground.
In 2024, once again Foley appeared to confirm that a new stadium was the route that the club was taking. Once the new training ground complex at Canford was complete.
However, it would now appear that the plans first mooted two and a half years ago could well be coming to fruition and quite quickly. Despite a lack of any information in the public domain and the football club having still not agreed a deal with the stadium landlords Structadene.
Speaking about the near completion of the training facility, Foley’s focus shifts to the redevelopment of Dean Court.
Speaking to talkSPORT radio, Foley said…
“…We are opening our new training facility in April and the players are moving in before the end of the month, and the academy will move over probably in late April or early May.
“That’s a big first step, and this is a serious facility. Our players have already seen it, they’ve already toured it, with an indoor pitch and we will have four outdoor pitches.
“They’ll be under the lights so it’s a really state-of-the-art facility. The next step is really our stadium, and we are well underway to having a solution with several stages in mind.
“The first stage would be would grow to about 16,000 seats, the next stage would be about 20,000, and the third stage would be to about 24,000 seats and much more hospitality and a much more welcoming environment…
When asked more about the stadium plans Foley added…
“We are hopefully going to be acquiring the Vitality (Dean Court), w e have a plan in place. It is going to be a staged effort, and we need to have the council’s approval.
“We’ll start with the south stand, and we’ll really expand that and make that a permanent stand with some hospitality.
“At the same time we’re going to be redoing the main stand in terms of hospitality and ingress and egress, high speed elevators and so on so people aren’t having to walk up three flights to go to have lunch and then walk down two flights to go to their seats, and then walk two flights up again.
“The whole stadium is just antiquated and we need to improve it.
“We’ve been working hard on it. We had our general contractor was over in Las Vegas last week, last Monday, and we spent four or five hours together, going through options and looking at the stages and how we move forward and n ow we’re working with the council to see if we can get fairly rapid, quick approval for what we want to do.
“We’ve already raised the money, so the sooner we get approvals and we get our design finalised, we’ve already retained our architects and retained our builder and so on, we’ll be ready to go.
“People will be surprised with how quickly we go with this situation.”
Your say…
SteveJonesLegend said…
Buying Dean Court is ‘probably’ the right thing to do… It will be a difficult project, ensuring we can keep ‘current’ 11,000 fans attending initially and slowly increase throughout the duration of the rebuild. Foley talks of rebuilding the South stand first and soon after, the Main stand to quickly increase numbers and of course, hospitality… Lots of moans on Twitter of ‘hospitality this, hospitality that’, but it’s Bill’s money and this is where he’ll bring some of his dollars back in, so I don’t really see how folks can moan…
I think a rebuilt DC with 24k fans will do just fine, thank you… Given everything he’s said, designs and contractor acquisition is well advanced so we could see some movement on this in the off-season…
New Old Cherry wrote…
It’s underwhelming hearing of an increased capacity of this stadium to 18,000 (24000) when we really need a New stadium of at least double that if we are going to be competing in Europe and with a dream potential of being the ‘British Barcelona’ in our ideal location and catchment area on the South Coast…let it not be Brighton who beats us to it. !
Why the sudden emphasis on rebuilding and upping capacity to this limited stadium…when it’s a larger one with space around it that’s needed and has previously been indicated as ‘happening’ sometime before 2028…elsewhere in Kings Park!
This guy has the financial means to achieve it , whereas Maxim Denim was limited but provided us with the platform.
That platform is still there.
Two 3 – 0 wins at Old Trafford to wake them up and now looks like they might get their new stadium before we get ours …
Sandman2 posted…
Sounds like a bit of a juggling act to rebuild DC. South end, I would imagine is fairly easy – break down the temporary Ted Mac and build a new stand in place, although this means we temporarily lose approx 2200 seats from an already tiny stadium whilst this happens. No idea how the rest of DC will pan out and will be interesting to see the plans when finally released.
I think 24k hits the spot as BF had underestimated the demand for tickets when he was previously talking about 18k capacity. Having said that, how do you fit something like the Mad Stad (25k) squeezed into a corner of King’s Park, with housing backed on to two sides of the current stadium?
DangerousDave replied…
It’s hard to get too excited with any of the stadium stuff because every time that he does an interview he says something completely different.
First it was to build a new stadium.
Then it was dig down at Dean Court and increase to 18,000 seats.
Now it is three stages, starting at 16,000 seats.
He also said that we can match pretty much anyone in terms of player salaries, which clearly isn’t true.
You can’t help but get drawn in by his enthusiasm but if you actually stop to listen and think about some of the things that he is saying then there are reasons to be cautious. – To join the conversation, please click here.