Everyone keeps talking about selling Seagrave or at least leasing it whilst we’re in L1. I get it. It’s an obvious revenue stream but there are two key factors that people are overlooking.
One - Seagrave counts as club infrastructure. The £15m per annum to run it is within the allowance of PSR as it’s an investment into the club. In real terms, the cost of running it will outweigh the tv revenue for a L1 club. That’s how clubs go bust. I don’t know the way around that other than to say that surely the King Power group just need to stump up the £15m per year until they get us out of this mess. If they can’t do that then they need to sell to someone who can. They wanted this training ground. They funded it. They should have planned for a potential future outside of the top flight. We’re Leicester City. We’re not exactly strangers to relegation.
Two - Belvoir Drive is sitting there as an asset that could and should be sold. It’s now exclusively honing the women’s team. That to me is a total waste of a sellable asset. The women don’t need their own training ground. Seagrave has over 20 pitches. It’s absolutely huge. I would be more in favour of us selling the land at Belvoir Drive and moving the women across to Seagrave. That would then also add to positive PSR as you’re then running one training ground between the men’s, women’s and youth teams.
Only (and it is major) issue with my second point is the land value of Belvoir Drive will be pretty low. No one is going to buy an old run down training ground in its current state. A business may buy it for land but land isn’t overly valuable as an asset. Furthermore, it’s probably not big enough for a lot of potential proprietors.
King Power got us into this mess. They built a state of the art training ground which as a top 6 club (at the time), was a good idea. But with just one year of parachute payments left and I fail to see how the club can afford it. Therefore KP has to just fund it directly.