The Riverside stand at Fulham football club is one step closer to completion this week after Hammersmith and Fulham Council approved a series of planning applications that will see new bars, a café and even a hotel installed at the Premiership club.
Although the stand itself is built, many of the facilities are not, with the result that most of the seats are empty on match days and fans buy food and drinks at makeshift plywood stalls within the building shell.
On Tuesday, however, the club’s plans to add those facilities at the Craven Cottage site on four floors were approved, despite some local opposition, meaning that Fulham FC is licensed to run a hotel, members club, spa café, and bars, as well as a restaurant, in the stand.
The club hopes to open the stand fully at the end of this year but that will be in the middle of the season, making it difficult for the club to sell the packages of game seats with onsite food & drink that it hopes will help it raise more money than just selling tickets.
The packages aren’t cheap. While season tickets costs between £600 and £1,250 a year depending on where you’re sat, the new Riverside packages start at £2,500 and go up to £10,000 – far out the reach of most fans and the most expensive in the Premiership.
Tension with fans
Tensions have been increasing between fans and management with the most recent meeting of the Club and the Fulham Supporters Trust focussed entirely on ticket prices. Fans say the prices are too high while the Club clearly believes they could be increased and still fill the ground. Fulham FC is in the top-tier of Premiership clubs when it comes to cost, with only fellow London clubs Tottenham and Arsenal consistently charging more.
A careful compromise has been struck for the 2024/2025 season with a season ticket increase of 4 per cent, compared to 18 per cent and 10 per cent increases the two previous years. But when the Riverside stand is completed, some fear that prices will jump again.
The Club’s proposal to create a new Fan Advisory Board (FAB) is also seen as a way in which the club will try to smooth the path from where the club has traditionally sat toward the more modern model of a Premiership club where games serve as hospitality events.
That said, Fulham FC fans are tired of seeing a mostly empty stand on game days and the extra money that the new packages bring in could give the club deeper pockets and increase its changes of rising up from the mid-table, and possibly even lucrative – and exciting – slots in European football.
Local complaints
But back to the planning application approvals: there were a range of objections filed against Fulham FC’s plans, mostly against the proposed opening hours during which alcohol can be served.
The spa café would open at 8am and some of the other bars would use pub hours, closing around 11pm. Meanwhile, the hotel would be open 24 hours a day, although the club has said it will only serve residents and ‘bona fide guests’ on the premises, in order to avoid the situation where football fans hang around after the game until the early hours of the morning.
Nevertheless some local residents are not happy. “This is a football club, not a multipurpose arena,” one formally objected. “Sales of alcohol on such a scale would result in disruption to normally very tolerant neighbours… and spoil residents’ enjoyment of the river.”
At the council meeting this week, chair of the Fulham Society and a local resident, Isobel Hill-Smith, also opposed the plans, telling the Licensing Sub-Committee that “the noise of people enjoying alcohol would be broadcast, particularly because the river amplifies the sound”.
The club’s vision is loftier and more high-brow with its chairman saying in an update on its website: “It’s about offering the ultimate matchday hospitality experience in the world that will also benefit the long-term promise and future of Fulham Football Club.”
The solicitor for Fulham FC argued that it was normal for hotels to have 24-hour licences to allow for minibars in rooms, and pointed out that there were only going to be 13 rooms in the hotel anyway so the fear of large groups of drunk people late at night wouldn’t happen as a result of the hotel application. The council passed the measures.
There is one thing everyone can agree on however: it’s time the stand was finished. First planned a decade ago, with work starting in 2019, the Riverside stand was originally due to open in September 2021 but first the pandemic and then the collapse of the company building it, the Buckingham Group, has caused a series of delays in the £100m development.
When it is finished, the stand will be able to hold an additional 8,000 spectators, making the total for the ground roughly 28,500 – which will still make Craven Cottage one of the smallest grounds in the Premiership. Manchester United’s Old Trafford ground, for example, has a capacity of just under 75,000 people.
