Manchester City has become a template for using a sporting venue as a springboard for the regeneration of one of the city’s poorest areas. Construction work around that ground has been in progress for years. At present, the club is building a new 400-room hotel next door, alongside new retail and restaurant space.
It is the latest part of the club’s local investment, which began a few years after a member of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family bought the team in 2008. The area now houses City’s training centre, a stadium for its women’s team, and more recently the Co-op Live arena, a music venue co-owned by the club that can host 23,500 people.
Ultimately, local leaders and the club are planning for new development to spread from Eastlands two miles along the canal to the city centre, through a series of derelict and unregenerated areas.
Eastlands has since become “the poster child” for sports-led urban regeneration, according to Jason Prior of infrastructure consultancy Aecom. But it was not straightforward. The next phase of the transformation between the stadium and the city centre must have been looked at by regeneration teams “every day for the last 25 years”, he told the Financial Times.
Regeneration around Manchester City’s Etihad stadium has transformed the area’s Eastlands district.Such work requires careful sequencing to unlock each challenge in the right order. “It’s a constant process of reflection,” he told the Pink ‘Un, “measuring what you’ve done, reviewing and keeping pace with the community and stepping in when things aren’t working — and not taking the easy route.” He adds: “Manchester always stuck to its plan.”
Nonetheless, the partnership between the club’s owners and the city council has, at times, proved controversial. One housing joint venture between the local authority and Abu Dhabi United Group, Manchester Life, has been criticised for a lack of financial transparency — a claim which the council denies.
Abu Dhabi’s human rights record has been a source of contention for Manchester’s Labour-led council. Paul Michael Brannagan, an expert on sport and politics at Manchester Metropolitan University, says that if clubs want to receive government funding, they need to present “these developments as essential to city planning”. But he adds that the projects reflect the changing social role of large clubs and their stadiums. “They are no longer just places to watch football, but are now rather positioned as central features of contemporary urban planning.”
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