Share return points to prosperous future for Huddersfield Town

It has paved the way for a £100m redevelopment and the creation of over 900 jobs for building and running a ski slope, hotel, flats, bingo hall, shops, restaurants and nightclubs on the site.

Town (40 per cent), Kirklees Council (40 per cent) and Huddersfield Sporting Pride (20 per cent) will again jointly control the company which runs the venue, Kirklees Stadium Development Limited.

Town’s original share was transferred by former chairman Ken Davy to his Huddersfield Sporting Pride company to protect them from the stadium’s debts in 2005.

The owner of Huddersfield Giants – they have a 20 per cent stake in KSDL – agreed to return the share to new Town owner Dean Hoyle in 2009 and Kirklees Council have agreed to it.

Mr Clibbens enthused: “We have made a great step forward with the latest news from Kirklees Council.

“The cabinet has agreed a proposal that will pave the way for the shares to be returned.

“The legal agreements that go along with that have still got to be worked through and finalised and that might may even take a couple of months but the principle is agreed now that Kirklees Council is willing to grant consent and we have got to put that into a legal agreement. At the moment, there is a legal agreement that determines how the stadium operates and, of course, because it has two shareholders, Huddersfield Sporting Pride and the council, that agreement relates to two parties. What has to be changed is for it to relate to three parties as a normal shareholder agreement would so that’s got to happen.

“We would anticipate that should be straight-forward - it will just take some time but it is a big step forward for the club and it is very welcome news for everybody.

“The football club - the same with the rugby club - regardless of whether they have any shares or not has got a lease which gives them rights to the stadium for usage on a matc-day etcetera, etcetera. That is cast-iron and can’t be altered. In terms of any development of the site, clearly that would need changes to the lease. Those changes might actually in the short term result in detriment to both clubs but if there is a big development in the longer term then you get a gain in the longer term.

“If we weren’t to have any shares then why we would we as a club take the detrimental position in the short term if there is no upside later on? So it would have been like a development where the tenants had to be looked after and that would have made it much more difficult. This way, rather than being passive and just sitting here having buildings go up around us we can participate, we can take an active role and hopefully put our full weight behind it and make it more successful.

“The way it would work is that it is still early days in terms of the financial structure. The time has been spent so far on coming up with a viable scheme looking at the site, the land that is available what users could come onto the site to make it viable and how much that might cost to build and how much the financial return might be. All that has been gone through.

“The next stage would then be to go out to investors and say ‘do you want to invest in this scheme?’. Because Huddersfield Town would have a 40 per cent stake in Kirklees Stadium Development Limited that company itself would have an interest automatically in this scheme. Therefore, indirectly, we would have an interest in the scheme without actually putting any money into it so there is a long way to go in terms of who puts some more money into it beyond that.

“I know that there are a number of other football clubs across the countyr where it is clear that having a big site that is not fully utilised causes problems. You have all the problems of upkeep and cost of owning it and it doesn’t actually bring anything in. There are lots of football clubs looking at developing the land that they own. I know there is talk of developments down at Elland Road; Plymouth, for one, had big plans to develop around their ground and there’s lots of other clubs looking to utilise the footprint that they have got and we’d be able to benefit from that as well.

“That would then make the stadium less costly in terms of how much we have to put in to keep it running - there’d be another income stream coming into that and that would then mean that both clubs would be more successful.

“There would be more money for both clubs and it would be better for the town as well. It should create lots of jobs and we are hopeful that things will now accelerate prety quickly.

“This is one of the problems in that the stadium, although it has been up for 15 years, the debts that were incurred in building it still have got a long time to run in terms of being paid off. And that means that the footbal club and the rugby club have to pay rents that go towards paying that debt off. So, realistically, if you have a stadium that is built and paid for you are all right but if but if you have embarked on building your own, that has got to be funded and while you are paying that debt back it is a drain and one football game a week isn’t really viable which is why we need to develop other facilities on the site.”