AFC Bournemouth owner Bill Foley has recently visited the Cherries training ground complex at Canford.
AFC Bournemouth have had long-held aspirations of building a training ground on the site, with the first plans submitted back in August 2017.
By July 2019, AFC Bournemouth had submitted revised plans for the development of the Canford Magna site.
The new facilities were reported at the time to include nine full-size pitches, three junior pitches, three goalkeeping pitches, an indoor artificial playing surface and an outdoor artificial playing surface, as well as state-of-the-art medical, fitness, sports science and rehabilitation facilities, administrative space and a press conference theatre.
However, with the world struck by a global pandemic in 2020, Premier League football was suspended and then re-started, with the Cherries ultimately relegated from the Premier League, the project was put on hold once again.
Various delays followed, but the development cranked up speed following the club’s return to the Premier League and takeover by American businessman Bill Foley.
We sent our drone over the training ground to see the recent developments…
Safe to say it's coming along nicely 😍 pic.twitter.com/s9K6OFOBxl
— AFC Bournemouth 🍒 (@afcbournemouth) April 5, 2024
The project is inching closer and closer to completion, where the target for quite some time has been for the club to move everything to the new site by the Autumn of 2024.
Speaking to Sky Sports, Foley said…
“Now that we’ve moved up the table a bit, which I was confident we would do this year, I believe we’ll start attracting more talent and better talent that will want to stay in Bournemouth.
“They won’t want to move on. That’s our job. A place like this (training ground), the indoor pitch that we’ve built is fantastic.
“We want to play in Europe. Do we get to the top four or top five? Complicated, difficult for Bournemouth.
“But with a new stadium and these facilities, we can keep on doing better every year.
“We have a really good team. The team is motivated in becoming a team, as opposed to a group of individuals.
“If we can continue doing that moving forwards, we’ll be successful.”
"Football is the greatest sport in the world, and the Premier League is the greatest league in the world" 👀
Bournemouth Owner Bill Foley shares his business philosophy and explains why he went for the Cherries 🍒 pic.twitter.com/OAXnPSizbH
— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) April 9, 2024
On future developments, Foley again spoke about plans for a new stadium, which has previously been earmarked for Kings Park, building on where the current training ground is.
In previous interviews, Foley mentioned the desire for an 18,500-capacity stadium with the potential to expand it at a later date to 22,000.
But he has now added that this will not prevent the club from investing in some redevelopment at the current Dean Court ground, particularly around increasing hospitality options.
Foley continued…
“What I’m really focused on is community involvement. Let’s be part of the community, let’s embed ourselves in the community and have the community embedded with us.
“I believe we can do a better job of that.
“A new stadium is going to help. It will give us an extra 6,000 to 8,000 seats to expand our fanbase and bring in some younger fans.
“That’s really our next big milestone and next step.
“It’s going to take a while to build that stadium, but we’ve made changes to Vitality (Dean Court) and there will be more changes made.
“As the players move out here (to Canford), it gives us the opportunity to do some revisiting of some of our stands now and more premium seating.
“We’ll do all that while we’re waiting to build the new stadium.
“So, embed ourselves in the community and have the community embedded with us. That’s my goal.”
Your say…
LewSwimmin said…
If BF is only planning to stay at DC for four more seasons, and assuming that a second floor could be added this summer to the block behind the east stand to provide more hospitality boxes (a fairly big if!) ready for next season, a quick back-of-the-fag-packet calculation suggests that this would not generate much if any, income over and above that required to pay for it in the first place.
Twelve boxes might generate approximately £2million+ in revenue over the four seasons, which is probably not a lot different from the cost of constructing the additional floor combined with the costs of reconfiguring the two existing floors to provide different types of accommodation from that already there.
Is it worth it, or are there more efficient ways of spending £2m to generate extra revenue until the new stadium is built?
Kudos replied…
Making the assumption that is it marginally profitable it would also be a good segway into boxes into the new ground. Give those who are already subscribed first dibs in the new stadium and will shrink the problem of having to fill a bunch of boxes when the new stadium arrives.
kirsikka added…
Exactly this. Plus it’s an extra £500k of revenue to help with whatever FFP system they come up with. Someone said about the season ticket increase it was only going to raise an extra few hundred K or something. On their own all these things may not make a difference but add them all up… – To join the conversation, click here.
