When Liverpool fans return to Anfield on Saturday, they will see the new £80m Anfield Road take a step closer to the final article.The rebuild is progressing quickly and the club hope to welcome the Clarets in a bid to increase Anfield’s capacity to 60,000. There is still work to be done on the back row and upper ground to increase the capacity to 61,000, but the opening of the catering industry means that the projects the club originally planned to implement are almost complete.
At the beginning of the season. Reds owner Fenway Sports Group previously oversaw the £110m build of the current main stand, which also included improving the ground experience. But if former owners Tom Hicks and George Gillette had kept their promises, Liverpool could have played in a very different home. Seventeen years ago the Reds signed the American player and a year later announced big plans to move from Anfield to a 60,000-seater stadium near Stanley Park as part of a £300m investment of pounds sterling.
The design created by Dallas architecture firm HKS was certainly unique. All four stands had to be different on purpose. This broke from the uniform ‘bowl’ approach of other new stadiums at the time and was centered around a large, single-tiered Kop that could seat around 20,000 fans. “The whole stadium will be fantastic, but the Kop will be fantastic too,” Hicks said.
“Everything in the stadium will be new, except for the Kop. It is futuristic, imaginative and very interesting. “People who see it will think of Liverpool,” he said.This was not surprising as Gillett had voiced the new owners’ views on the new stadium, bluntly saying at the opening press conference in February 2007: “The shovel has to be in the ground in 60 days.”This references existing plans for a traditional 60,000-seat structure on the same Stanley Park site, designed by Manchester Architects AFL in 2003.
The scheme, originally due to be completed in 2006, was scrapped after Hicks and Gillett failed to raise the £215m needed before a revaluation, which they were about to announce in a big way.”Construction will begin as soon as possible,” Parry added. “We hope the new design will become popular and attract the attention of planners.
Our goal is to be ready for 2010.”Hicks and Gillette weren’t afraid to think big. “It’s designed to handle over 70,000 vehicles,” Hicks said. “If you want to increase the number to 75,000 or 80,000, you have to go through an approval process. “This will happen over a three-year construction cycle. We want to be competitive and have over 60,000 fans on our waiting list. “We need more seats, so I think about 70,000 seats would be about right,” he said.
But like most things promised by the American pair during their takeover of Liverpool, it was all bluff rather than the real truth.
Although some factors were beyond Hicks and Gillett’s control, the plan failed and the global credit crunch saw costs rise to £400 million by the end of 2007.
In December, Parry admitted that the plan was “not as good” as HKS’s and would not be completed until 2011. Hicks and Gillett’s financial problems and the conflicts that threatened to destroy the Reds meant that the pitch was rejected, with the club’s future in jeopardy. And when the pair were removed and replaced by FSG, the new owners announced in January 2012 that they would abandon the major redesign of HKS and return to the original overall design of the new stadium.
