Feature

Lincoln City chairman open to safe standing at new stadium

Bob Dorrian, the chairman of English League Two football club Lincoln City, has said he would consider safe standing zones at the team’s new stadium.

The club is hoping to move to a new 12,000-capacity ground within the next five years.

League One club Shrewsbury Town recently announced plans to introduce safe standing at its Greenhouse Meadow home ground, making it the first English side to introduce it since its ban. The 10,000-capacity stadium is currently all-seater, but the club has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for rail seating to be fitted.

Standing at football matches was outlawed in the top two divisions following the Taylor Report into the 1989 Hillsborough Disaster, in which 96 Liverpool fans died.

Clubs such as Lincoln are following in the footsteps of Scottish Premiership club Celtic, which implemented a 2,600-capacity safe standing area at the beginning of the 2016-17 season at Celtic Park.

“It’s something we would seriously consider having in our new stadium, without a doubt,” said Dorrian.

“We’d need to go through a consultation process with our fans before we’d settle on anything, just so that we’d be 99.9 per cent certain that we’d get it right as far as the fans are concerned. It’s really important that we do that.

“It’s an ongoing consultation with all sorts of people. Each month we move a little bit closer compared to where we were the previous month. The timescale is out of our hands to a certain degree.”

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