Not sure where all this 'the DW is a white elephant....not economically viable etc' comes from. There is absolutely no need to pull it down / start again / move to a new stadium. This talk is nonsense.
Everyone seems fixated on the annual £1.4m loss the stadium made last year, and cites this as the reason the stadium can't make money. This overlooks a couple of huge issues;
- Half a million quid is depreciation on the fixed asset of the stadium - valued at 22m. This is ethereal, and is an accounting loss, rather than a true loss, especially if the stadium were purchased for only 3 million
- That leaves just under a million in losses, during a time where the stadium has received no sponsorship revenue or money for naming rights due to DW's narcissistic fudge
- Stadium name rights regularly bring in between 0.5-1m quid per year, which almost wipes out any losses
- Then remember how poorly the stadium has been run, by an overseas consortium who were not interested in it.
Run it properly from the UK, use it for RL challenge cup semi finals / England games again / concerts / sell merchandise within the stadium etc, and run the bar, food sales and stewarding properly - ie/ only open 3 stands for the rugby, only open 1/2 for the football depending upon gate etc. Suddenly the 1.4m loss very easily becomes profitable!
IL could, and would, make that happen IMO and the ground becomes key to our future sustainability.
The biggest issue is the administrators insistence to sell the ground as a package with Latics. From our perspective, the best thing that can happen is that this continues to rumble on, and they realise that there are no buyers interest in parting with the best part of 9m quid (4m for the stadium and 5m to guarantee continuing losses as mandated by the EFL) for a club who is expected to be in the bottom division of English football within a year.
The most sensible option is to sell the ground to Leneghan, Latics sell to the supporters club with their 700k investment, and they go cap in hand to Whelan to ask that he props them up and assures their future by providing a gift of around 4m to keep them in business. Whelan appoints a community board and immediately drops out, and away they go! If DW is as bothered about WA as he says he is, then such an amount really is very little considering the tens of millions he has already thrown at them.