Peterborough United owner wants 'long term plan in place' in 2025 to provide city with new football stadium and concert venue

Posh owner Darragh MacAnthony has said that plans for a new stadium are always in his mind that he wants a long term plan put into place in 2025.

Plans for a new stadium for the club have been mooted since back in 2018 when Canadians Jason Neale and Stewart Thompson brought into the club.

As of last year, MacAnthony is now back as club’s majority owner having repurchased a controlling stake from the pair.

Financial disputes over the past year have seen new stadium plans put on the backburner as the club looks to settle its debts to the investment fund Old Kent Road as well as work on a plan to bring the company which owns the current London Road stadium- London Road Peterborough Properties Ltd- out of receivership.

The company was placed into receivership over a reported outstanding debt of £6.6m in 2023.

Speaking on his Hard Truth podcast, MacAnthony has said that he hopes to achieve this by the end of the year before pushing on in 2025 to set out a long term plan for delivering a new stadium for the city.

He said: “My biggest priority is taking the debt down and sorting out the current stadium, which has been in receivership for too long.

“I want to solve both of those issues this side of Christmas and then meet with the new leaders of the council. Regardless of who is in power, everyone knows what a stadium would do for the city of Peterborough.

“I want to then move onto a 2025 vision to try and get some sort of a long term plan.

“This city needs good projects and this helps everyone, it’s something that needs to be done.

“We’re getting to the stage where we’re growing. We’re trying to hit a 10k average attendance this year. It’s an old stadium, we’re going into certain games not being able to sell tickets because our capacity is capped at a certain size.

“That’s where, if you had a 50 or 17.5k stadium, some of those games would potentially sell out.”

MacAnthony has also suggested that the city has missed out on a number of concerts due to restricted size of the current stadium, capable of holding just over 13,500 people.

Posh have spoken of their desire to utilise the Embankment for the project but no firm decision on a location is close at this stage.

MacAnthony added: “We’ve also been really screwed on concerts. We could have had three great concerts this summer but they close to go to places like Northampton instead of us. That alone is worth seven figures to the city.

"Common sense has to prevail.

“The new stadium is in my mind all of the time.”

Posh are also looking at plans to expand their training ground at Nene Park Academy to add more pitches alongside modernising the facilities for the academy and providing them with their own area.

This is alongside an investment of around £600k in building a new megastore at the current stadium to increase revenue.