Scottish Rugby committed to Murrayfield

Image: Murrayfield Stadium, Vclaw, CC BY-SA 3.0

Scottish Rugby has underlined its commitment to Murrayfield Stadium and will carry out an on-going series of improvements at the venue.

The Offside Line said there have long been rumours and speculation that a site to the west of the city, near the airport, could provide a potential new home for the national men’s team.

But John McGuigan – Chair of the SRL Board [the operational arm of the organisation] – has stated unequivocally that Murrayfield is the home of the national team and that there is no question of selling up and moving to an out-of-town location.

Murrayfield Stadium (known as the Scottish Gas Murrayfield Stadium for sponsorship reasons, or popularly as Murrayfield) is a rugby stadium located in the Murrayfield area of Edinburgh, Scotland (UK). It has a seating capacity of 67,144 making it the largest stadium in Scotland and the fifth largest in the United Kingdom.

The stadium in its current guise was completed 30 years ago, making it the second oldest Six Nations venue – behind only the Stadio Olimpico in Rome which was renovated for the 1990 World Cup – and there is no escaping the fact that the wear and tear of three decades is takings it toll.

Speaking after Scottish Rugby’s AGM, McGuigan said, “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.”

He said any work would have to be incremental because Scottish Rugby doesn’t have the 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,” he added. “The future is definitely at Murrayfield. And not just focusing on the [international] bowl, but also the footprint or 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.”

The Offside Line further stated that on the plus side, Scottish Rugby owns significant land around Murrayfield Stadium which can be utilised for hospitality and subsidiary events, or even developed with the building of a hotel for a long-established potential source of income.

McGuigan said, “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.

“We don’t necessarily have to pay for that. There are hotel chains that would come to us and say: ‘Look, to have something 10 minutes from the airport, 10 minutes from town, right next to a tram station, is a bit of a no-brainer for us as well!’

“It’s that type of thing we need to think about. We also need to go back to government and see whether there are things we’re doing that they could help us with financially. That’s obviously very difficult, but there might be things around the environmental aspect of how we do stuff – there might be opportunities to receive grants etc.

“So we need to be very creative in terms of how we do it. No-one is going to come along and give us a big chunk of money. We are not going to seek out a big chunk of money to do something. It’s going to have to be very incremental, utilising everything that’s available to us to develop the stadium and the footprint of Murrayfield. But we’re absolutely staying here.”

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