Renovation work at English Premier League football team Stoke City’s Bet365 Stadium is progressing well, the club’s chief executive Tony Scholes has revealed.
Stoke is currently ‘filling in’ the southeast corner of the ground to add more seats to a vacant area of the stadium between two stands.
Work commenced in January and once completed the capacity of the ground, formerly known as the Britannia Stadium, will increase from 27,902 to over 30,000. Work is expected to be ready in time for the start of the 2017-18 season in August.
The overall project will see almost 17,000 seats replaced, with the majority of work to take place following the conclusion of the 2016-17 season next month. Two state-of-the-art LED big screens will be fitted, with additional disabled bays to also be installed.
Scholes told the Stoke Sentinel newspaper: “The corner is coming along well. You will have seen steel work going up over the last few days and fans coming to the West Ham game on Saturday will see a big difference to where we were two weeks ago (for the home game against Hull City). It’s progressing well and everything is on track to be ready before the start of next season.”
He added: “There’s always that work ongoing and although the majority of the work this summer is in the new corner, that’s not it. It’s also about putting in disabled facilities to the northeast corner, a big screen in the northwest corner and some media facilities over there as well. We’re replacing a lot of seats as well.
“There’s a lot of work this year that supporters will see as opposed to previous years. Last year we spent not far shy of £5m (€5.9m/$6.4m) on three new pitches, one at the stadium and two at the training ground which are harder to see.”
