Wednesday, 11 June 2014

Liberty Stadium expansion to begin in January

Club announce tentative timeline for extra seating to be installed


About bloody time! This has been on the cards for a while, and it seems that finally we've got a rough date for the stadium expansion. The first phase of a proposed 11,000 seat expansion, it will see around four to five thousand extra seats being added to the East Stand, and given how often the Liberty is sold out it's easy to believe we'll be able to fill at least most of any additional seats added in this first phase.

Huw Jenkins is glad it's finally getting underway:

"It is a very expensive, complicated and time-consuming process, but we are making good progress working through the planning conditions, finances and the tender process." 
http://www.southwales-eveningpost.co.uk/Liberty-Stadium-expansion-come-robust-travel-plan/story-21210478-detail/story.html?#ixzz34JTRqSeU

Fingers crossed, at the commencement of the 2015./16 season, we'll have over twenty thousand Jacks cheering on the Swans - in the Premier League! 

The only potential concern is local residents' justified insistence on a travel and congestion plan for matchdays. In all honesty, the current situation is absolutely dire, and I'm sure I remember something about a rail link when the stadium was first announced. There has recently been talk of a new road along the Tawe and the council seem keen to get that going, so hopefully that'll do something to alleviate the current problems, but it is hard to see how a further five thousand seats could be added without causing more consternation for people trying to get to the game, as well as to the local residents who see their community gridlocked on matchdays.

I can imagine the club are working devilishly hard to address this and any other issue surrounding the expansion, and I'm confident that if they've deemed fit to mention a timeline in the press, they're fairly positive there won't be any holdups between now and January. That would hardly be "the Swansea way" of doing things, though!