Liverpool has decided to proceed with their original, nine-year-old stadium plans once they have secured the finance to start construction.
That means the alternative, futuristic stadium designs proposed by former owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett Jnr have been ditched for good.
It also ensures there will be no fresh planning application required by the current American owners to restart construction once a lucrative naming rights package is in place.
Fenway Sports Group has been working with Manchester-based architects AFL, the firm which first submitted designs when Liverpool announced their intention to move to Stanley Park as far back as 2000.
It is these proposals, which were put forward for planning permission in 2003 and given the green light a year later, which will become the blueprint for a new 60,000-seat stadium costing around £300 million.
The club must still find the finance to kick-start the scheme, and there is no immediate prospect of work beginning, but AFL’s return to preferred status is another significant twist in the seemingly never-ending saga of Liverpool’s ground move.
The AFL plans were first introduced by former chief executive Rick Parry but were abandoned by Hicks and Gillett shortly after their ill-fated takeover in 2006.
Hicks scrapped the original designs in favour of those he commissioned from a Dallas-based architecture firm, HKS.
The £400 million costs of the second scheme effectively triggered the beginning of the end of the old regime, as Hicks and Gillett could not raise the funds to build it.
It also led to the first major split of the old boardroom, as the plans were seen as too expensive and impractical.
Now Hicks’ grand scheme has been permanently shelved with FSG deciding it will modernize and upgrade the first set of designs.
Since buying the club, John W Henry has worked through a variety of options to establish how to solve Liverpool’s enduring stadium problem.
Henry originally wanted to redevelop Anfield, but after a year of toil working through the planning issues, and the cost of buying nearby residential properties, it was accepted this was not feasible.
FSG has also explored whether to commission new stadium plans, but the time and cost restraint also made that a non-starter.
Liverpool has planning permission for two designs.
If the club submitted a third to Liverpool City Council, it could delay the process by another three years and there could be no guarantee they would be passed, especially given a political fervour to maintain a dialogue with Everton on the controversial issue of a groundshare.
It would be an incredibly risky strategy for FSG to start from scratch.
Liverpool still need to raise around £150 million in sponsorship — around half the costs – before they can start building any arena, but having decided which course to take there will be fewer obstacles in their way if a naming rights package can be secured in the near future.
That in itself remains a difficulty given economic conditions.
The single, desirable legacy of the Hicks and Gillett era was the fact they actually began preparatory work on Stanley Park prior to having to bring it to a halt when they failed to secure investment.
That means technically, and legally, construction of a stadium is considered to have already started by the council.
This has enabled the new owners to avoid missing out on any deadlines to complete a project.
Liverpool City Council is also eager for the club to make progress as soon as possible, so have not issued time constraints.
Some Liverpool fans may be worried that plans nearly 10 years old, which were publicly criticized by Hicks as being ‘out of date’ five years ago, are being given a facelift.
However, Liverpool believes Hicks’s criticism was always unwarranted and the AFL plans — inspired in part by the Millennium Stadium in Wales — were also impressive.
Although the club is limited in terms of altering how the arena will look, its size and the space it will fill from the accepted designs, there is still plenty of capacity to upgrade the interiors to modern standards.
Any suggestion the nine-year-old architects’ plan is out of date will be dismissed by the owners, who recognize AFL’s vast portfolio in stadium design.
The firm is responsible for recent upgrades at Old Trafford and the Nou Camp, and built the Liverpool, Manchester United, Chelsea and Everton training complexes.
