Aberdeen chairman Dave Cormack will not need three guesses to determine which issue is likely to be top of the agenda at tonight’s annual meeting at Pittodrie.
Relations between the Dons and Aberdeen City Council appear to be frostier than the recent cold snap following the council’s insistence Aberdeen must provide all the funding for the proposed new stadium at the beach.
We, and the club, should have known it was all too good to be true.
An invite to hold off on building a new stadium next to Cormack Park and consider making a new home the centrepiece of a redeveloped and revitalised beachfront.
The fans were keen and the people of Aberdeen also seemed to be open to the idea.
Cormack and his directors then did some legwork of their own in commissioning an independent economic review into whether a stadium at the beach would be a good thing.
The results were hugely encouraging, if a tad optimistic, but Aberdeen rightly wanted to sing from the rooftops about the results.
But all the noises about a billion-pound boost to the city have fallen on deaf ears as far as the council is concerned.
Aberdeen City Council have moved the goalposts
A change of administration has brought a complete about-turn with regard to support for the Dons.
A report by the council’s chief commercial officer Craig Innes, which will go before councillors this week, states a stadium could be included at the beachfront but, and it’s a big but, is dependent on capital investment from the club.
A new stadium for Aberdeen has been a priority for decades but neither Cormack, nor his predecessor Stewart Milne, have been able to get to a point where the dream has become a reality.
Councillors will discuss the report on Wednesday but you can be sure Cormack will face questions tonight.
Whether the Dons chairman will have any answers, however, is uncertain.
Decision time looming for the Dons
Cormack is not back to square one, but he and his board certainly have a decision to make now.
Option one is to make another plea to the council or go it alone and build at the beach regardless.
How keen Aberdeen would then be to get in bed with the current administration given recent developments is unclear.
Plan B is to pull the plug completely and go back to the Kingsford site for the stadium.
The same plan which had been provisionally in place until the previous council administration approached the club and asked them to hit the pause button.
The third, and unlikeliest choice is to revisit redeveloping Pittodrie.
The chairman and other officials have been vocal in the past about the shelf-life of the club’s spiritual home and said the cost and reduced capacity Pittodrie would have at the end of the project meant it was not a viable option for consideration.
Has the stance softened or could the option be revisited? We’ll find out soon enough.
Timing couldn’t be worse for AFC
But clearly the timing of all of this could not be much worse for the club.
Like most businesses, the Covid pandemic was a financially devastating period and the operating loss of £5.29 million for the period that ended June 30 followed a £5.19m loss the previous year.
Next year should be a significant improvement thanks to the sale of Calvin Ramsay to Liverpool and Lewis Ferguson to Bologna in the summer.
But sourcing funding for a stadium, whether it is for redevelopment or a new build, is going to be challenging in the current climate.
In other words, the chairman and his board have much to ponder in the weeks and months ahead.
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