Scottish Rugby committed to Murrayfield amid development plans

Scottish Rugby has confirmed its long-term future lies at Scottish Gas Murrayfield Stadium and has set out its vision for redevelopment work that could include an on-site hotel.

Murrayfield has been the governing body’s home since opening in 1925, but with its last major renovations coming three decades ago it requires improvement work. Earlier this month, Scottish Rugby reported record revenues of £73.9m (€88.8m/$93.8m) while posting a loss of £11.3m amid financial restructuring efforts.

Scottish Rugby in July detailed a “financial reset” programme that is designed to provide a pathway to profitability by 2026-27. At that time, it said it was formulating a redevelopment plan for Murrayfield, but the organisation’s financial challenges have led to talk it may seek to sell up its current position in Edinburgh in favour of pursuing a potential move to a new stadium out of town.

The stadium situation was discussed as Scottish Rugby held its annual general meeting yesterday (Thursday). John McGuigan, who chairs Scottish Rugby Limited, the operational arm of the governing body, said: “The future is definitely at Murrayfield. And not just focusing on the bowl, but also the footprint of the stadium in terms of how we develop that.

“Clearly, the more things that we get the opportunity to do, like events outside of the rugby, that will potentially give us more money in order to speed up that plan of things we want to do. That’s why we’re really keen to continually promote Murrayfield as a place to come and do other things.”

Oliver Colling, Scottish Rugby’s interim chief financial officer, said capital expenditure currently being planned for Murrayfield amounts to “around £10m over the next two years”.

McGuigan continued, according to The Offside Line: “We’re going to have an ongoing rolling plan of continuous work that we do. We’ve done the screens in the stadium, we’ve done the PA system in order to upgrade it so that when referees want to speak we’ve got something in place that actually enables that to happen, and from a safety point of view it all works.

“We’re going to continue to do that type of thing. We’ve got things we must do to make sure the stadium remains safe. It is safe, but we need to continue to work on that. We need to do other things that enable a better fan experience.

“In an ideal world, we’ll incrementally build stuff that enables us to have fans coming earlier, staying longer, maybe watching another game – doing it in a space where they’re not dependent on weather alone to determine whether they can stay or not.

“It’s going to have to be incremental. We’re never going to have the type of money to do a complete reset of the stadium and the footprint. It’s going to have to be a very tactical, progressive thing that we do over the years.

“We can’t get ourselves into a position where we carry a debt that we’d struggle to manage. That’s not our agenda. Our agenda is to do it in a way that allows us to stay in a stable financial position, but recognise the fact that we’ve got more to do here in terms of how we develop the stadium.”

Scottish Rugby owns a large portion of land around Murrayfield, which could be utilised for projects such as a hotel. In Edinburgh, Premiership team Heart of Midlothian in February opened the doors on what it claimed is the UK’s first entirely club-owned and operated hotel inside a football stadium.

“There are some opportunities like a hotel (but) we’re at the very early stages of thinking about this, so I’m not suggesting we’re going to do it next year,” said McGuigan.

“A hotel would be an obvious thing to bring on site for a variety of reasons – you could run conferences there, you could have people staying there before a game. It makes it a better deal in terms of a concert promoter coming here and you could offer them that kind of facility on the doorstep.”