Senior football sources in Britain say a rebult Wembley Stadium as a multi-million pound football and athletics arena would become the centrepiece for a British bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics.
The new national stadium would be backed by both the Football Association (FA) and the Government, and would be the leading element of a bid supported by the Prime Minister and centred on various locations around London.
A report in the Observer says the Government is known to be interested in backing a London bid for the Games after Britain’s general election, although so far it has concentrated on developing plans for a new stadium in the east of London.
And Ken Livingtone, London’s mayor, also backs that option, arguing that building it in the less affluent East End means that it would be able to bring in extra Europen regeneration money.
The British government has so far refused to put any of its own money into the new Wembley project, because it says football is rich enough to fund its own national stadium. The report says that creating a new national stadium suitable for athletics as part of an Olympic bid would allow the Goverment to underwrite, arguing that it is a truly national project.
The FA is now prepared to contribute 100 million pounds to the cost of the development, and with a lottery grant of 120 million pounds already secured, the project would have a funding gap of 380 million pounds plus interest. The Government would probably take the lion’s share of this, says the report, with city institutions taking on the remainder.
Plans for a new Wembly includes a running track, which was excluded from the doomed project.
The FA knows that it will have a difficult time convincing the government that an Olympic bid for Wembley is the best way forward. It would jeopardise the develpment of the athletics stadium at Pickett’s Lock, north London, which will be the venue for the 2005 World Championships.
Official sources said that the Government was unwilling to give public money to the Wembley project. It would prefer a scaled down project that had fewer conference and hotel facilities based around an 80,000 seater stadium, which would only be used for football and rugby.
