Significant changes to the Sports Quarter masterplan

At the club's latest Open House event, it was revealed that the proposed training centre for the men's, women's and academy teams - as well as a women's stadium, and an academy stadium or 'show pitch' - are to be moved off site and built elsewhere, at a venue still to be sourced.

Head of infrastructure Nick Smith cited a 'squeeze' the space taken up by the 80-acre centre would place on The Powerhouse stadium, as well as issues surrounding service access, community impact and safety.

The centre - loosely based on Manchester City's Etihad Campus - would also cost three times more than the most expensive training ground in Europe, he disclosed.

The bombshell news came at the fifth Open House Blues have staged, with the tagline 'Belief'.

Currently, the men train in Henley-in-Arden at the Elite Performance and Innovation Centre (EPIC), a £4 million, 13-acre facility previously owned by Wasps rugby where Blues moved to in 2023.

The women and academy are based at the Knighthead Performance Centre - formerly Wast Hills - in West Heath, which is leased from the University of Birmingham.

The plan was to move all to the Sports Quarter, to a state-of-the-art training facility that would have had at least 20 pitches, indoor areas as well as a purpose-built stadium for the women.

The Sports Quarter site, based on and around the old Birmingham Wheels circuit less than a mile from St. Andrew's, covers around 135 acres, Smith said.

And the alterations mean that The Powerhouse timeline has been affected, too, with a planning application for the 62,000-seat, multi-purpose arena now likely to go in 'at the end of next year' instead of March.

The knock-on effect is also that the stadium completion would 'shift out' from 2030 to 2031.

Smith carefully explained the reasoning why the masterplan had changed. Here is what he said to the gathered audience in The Garrison room, at St. Andrew's.

I'd like to recap on what we shared with you in respect to our vision. A while back it was to create to global destination for sports, entertainment and media. As well as creating the largest, sports-led, regeneration in Europe, over the next decade. That includes a 135-acre site that has The Powerhouse stadium on, an 80-acre training centre, our head quarters, our foundation, a women's and youth academy and about 3.5 million sq ft of mixed use, commercial, retail, residential and hotels, etcetera, within the development.

We have continuously developed that masterplan and the Sports Quarter with these three guiding principles.

One, about the club. All great brands, all great cities and all great clubs have a place of which to grow and realise their ambition. For us, that place is The Powerhouse stadium, for the future. In terms of community - and I've said it's one of our measurement metrics of the Sports Quarter - is how does our investment in the Sports Quarter knit into the fabric of the existing community and allow that community to rise on the tide of the investment? So that was a guiding principle of what we had for the community.

And in terms of commercial, financial prudence - this is a huge project - is front and centre and core to the project. We will not put the club at risk from any financial decisions. The club is important in its long term investment and the decisions we are making, but we will not put the club at risk from decisions we are making on this huge and massive complex Sports Quarter project.

Those are our guiding principles to date. So, I have led a team of experts and masterplan developers for the past 18 months. The Sports Quarter has been developing and we have constantly been reviewing what is in excess of a £3 billion project. We are constantly reviewing design, to budgets, to plans, impact on community and taking all the feedback that you and the community have been giving us to date.

What we have found over the recent months, in getting into our last kind of review, is that our stadium, the Powerhouse Stadium, has started to get constrained into this corner of the site and has been trapped by these constraints of the canal, of the training centre and the two train lines. This (has been) driven by the expanding needs of the training centre. As we kind of developed the world's leading training centre and the 20 pitches we had in it, the stadium started to get constrained and it started to impact the service access of that stadium. That is critical, when we are trying to drive a multi-event, 365-day-a-year stadium.

Masterplan before and after

Furthermore, you have asked us to maintain all the fans parks and fan zone experiences and amplify it. As the stadium was getting constrained, we wanted to protect those spaces. By protecting those, we were pushing back on the training centre and starting to constrain the training centre on it development and achieving its ambition we wanted to do, on a world-leading training centre.

The Wheels site isolates the east of Birmingham from the city centre. You can't move through that site. And that has isolated a whole community from its opportunities and development. For those of you who know, elite training centres are pretty secure places. We want to protect our players. There is not a lot of movement of community through them - take Spygate, for example. We need to protect that and the people. So what we were doing with this training centre was actually still providing an island of isolation from the training centre to the community that sat around it. Although we were finding solutions of moving people around, it wasn't direct access to what we have always said is a 365-day-a-year stadium where we are wanting to activate it from both a community and fans (aspect) on an event day.

We then developed the training centre in real detail where we were able to cost it. That training centre, due to a number of factors - site constraints and other regulations - was coming out at three times the most expensive training centre in Europe. Now, I have delivered two of the biggest training centres in the country and I have benchmarked a number of others in Europe. That is not a good thing for our club to be doing. If you go back to our guiding principles of commercial . . . it's not what we are wanting to do.

So, taking all that into account, for our club, for our community, we also had the burning platform that our community was asking for more jobs, more homes, better places to come, better places to come together as a network, better neighbourhoods. We have also got the council trying to deliver more homes and more jobs within the city, as part of the city plan.

We therefore have taken the decision to relocate the training centre and the women's stadium and the youth stadium to an alternative location. We are still hugely committed to the investment and creating a world-leading training centre. But we have taken it away from the Sports Quarter site and we are going to invest and relocate it to an alternative venue. I have not found that venue yet. We have only made the decision a few weeks ago. We are actively looking. But I have already said 80 acres, that's the minimum we are going to look for because the training centre was already being constrained at 80 acres and so we have to go and find that site. For any of you who have tried to find a site for your house or anything else, 80 acres plus is not sitting on shelves anywhere, but we are committed and we are actively looking for that site to go and invest significantly, creating a world-leading training centre for the club - men and women and the youth. We believe the best location for the women's stadium and the youth stadium is to be co-located at that training centre.

So what does that mean for the Sports Quarter now? Well, it's simple. We still have the same vision, we are still going to deliver a global destination of sports, media and entertainment. We are actually going to deliver a much greater and better sports-led regeneration. We are going to have more community being able to access the site. And, again, creating more neighbourhoods, more housing. We are going to have more opportunity to create revenue opportunities for the club. So going back to the global destination, sports-led regeneration, we are delivering on everything we have set out to do. But foremost what have been our guiding principles of our Sports Quarter development, the club still holds its Powerhouse stadium and it still gets its training centre in a better location that makes it not squeezed and constrained. On the site we were trying to put futsal courts underneath buildings, we were putting pitches on top of roofs. Our groundsmen would be on cantilever roads trying to get round the site - it was all getting a bit too constrained. Taking it to a better location allows us to do a better and more effective training centre. Our Powerhouse stadium is now going to get freed up and moved into a better location, have better access for servicing, fan areas, better public (movement) around the stadium. It just frees up to live and breathe and to create a better 365-day-a-year stadium that is activated for the community. More of the community can come live, work and play within the site and move through the site, and get access to all the activity we are going to have in and around the stadium and event centre. And as I said, we have more opportunity to create revenue opportunities and more things for people to come and visit the Sports Quarter for, and enjoy it for.

In summary, following these principles, we are going to relocate the training centre to an alternate location and still deliver a world (class) training centre, with the women's stadium and youth stadium at that location.

We have absolute focus and unequivocal energy to deliver The Powerhouse stadium as well as include our headquarters and our foundation at the heart of the development of more homes, more work, more play for our community and the people that are engaging with us on the site.

What does that mean for planning? Previously I had said to you that we would submit for planning at the end of Q1 next year. With the reset of this masterplan, that is going to shift out. We are going to work tirelessly to deliver that as fast as we can, as quickly as we can, when the plans are developed. More likely it is going to be towards the end of next year that we submit our planning. In turn, what that does to the stadium, it means where we had hoped to have delivered it by 2030, that is going to shift out to 2031.