Current Coventry City Holdings CEO Tim Fisher is confident that SISU will be able to afford to build a new stadium.
With Coventry City Council and Arena Coventry Limited seemingly having seen through the attempts at negotiation by those involved with club owner's SISU Capital Ltd over the Ricoh Arena, Mr Fisher and his cohorts have decided on plans to build their own stadium already dubbed the "SISU Dome" by some City supporters.
Speaking to the Coventry Telegraph's Andy Turner, Mr Fisher thinks that this new stadium will be affordable thanks to a mixture of debt and equity and the money made from development around the site would be used as equity for the stadium, said; “We’re hardly pushing back the boundaries of realism. “We’re treading a very common pathway and, yet again, we can see another League One club going down a similar route.
“It validates our way of thinking about a new stadium. I am not saying it’s going to be residential like theirs but the pathway to financing is well trodden and here’s another example where Brentford have submitted for planning and this is how they will finance their stadium.
“That’s exactly what Brentford’s owner has done, in effect underwriting any funding gap, and that’s exactly what Sisu would do,” he said.
“I have been derided for it, people saying, ‘it’s an absolute nonsense,’ but it’s not because that’s how you do it. And it wouldn’t be £21m or £30m that Sisu would have to find. Far from it. You pay for the site, you then have the non stadium development around it that provides the equity for the whole deal.
“The footprint to the site we’re looking at is far larger than 7.6 acres so as a consequence the opportunity it bigger,” he said.
“We are working together with a team of specialists and professionals who have configured a series of ideal target sites and we’re down to the last two on one site in terms of bidding. The point of the Brentford announcement is that it validates our thinking and shows what can be achieved.”
More on this:http://www.coventrytelegraph.net/sport/football/football-news/sky-blues-chief-tim-fisher-4065237?
Source: Coventry MAD
Source: FOOTYMAD
