Newcastle United fans discussing the respective merits of redeveloping St James’ Park, or building a brand new stadium on a different site.

Asking Newcastle United fans, whether they would rather stay at St James’ Park or move to a brand new stadium, is a totally pointless question.

It only makes any sense whatsoever, if you are giving supporters some semblance of a proper question to answer.

If the alternative to redeveloping St James’ Park was say a brand new stadium 100 or two yards away at Leazes Park/Castle Leazes, then that is a very different question to say a brand new stadium on an industrial estate in Gateshead, or indeed anywhere outside walking distance of Newcastle Upon Tyne city centre.

You then of course have the question of what potentially the respective new capacities could/would be.

For example, if the choice was an expanded 60,000 St James’ Park or a 65,000 new stadium, that would be very different to say asking Newcastle United fans if they would be in favour of a 57,000 redeveloped SJP or an 80,000 brand new state of the are stadium.

For this article, I want you to imagine that the Newcastle United owners decide on the brand new state of the art 80,000 capacity new stadium, to be built on Leazes Park/Castle Leazes and that any obstacles/objections can be overcome to make this site and 80k stadium possible.

Could that size of stadium be filled?

This is my very strong belief…

Newcastle United fans could fill an 80,000 capacity new stadium – Have a look at this:

These are the average Premier League attendances from 1992/93, the first year following the rebranding (all stats via World Football):

As you can see, not anything like what we see in the Premier League in the modern day, they were different times. Man U were redeveloping Old Trafford back then, which partly explains why they were averaging 35k. However, reality is that this wasn’t a million miles away from their norm back then, as the previous two seasons (before the redevelopment work), they had averaged 43k and then 44k.

This first Premier League season of course saw Newcastle United still in the second tier, their fifth year in a row in that division. Despite that, Newcastle United averaged 29,048 in the second tier that season, filling St James’ Park ever week. That average would have been far higher but SJP was also getting redeveloped that season.

Despite that, only four Premier League sides had a bigger average than Newcastle United that 1992/93 season.

After promotion and Newcastle United adding over 4,000 more seats to their capacity, these were the average Premier League attendances in 1993/94:

As you can see, Newcastle United fans easily filling the new increased SJP capacity and despite the limitations of that roughly 33k capacity, NUFC had the fourth highest attendances.

For anybody naive enough to believe that Chelsea have ever been a ‘big’ club, maybe you should note that this season, which was the norm for Chelsea, they had lower attendances than BOTH Sheffield clubs. Yet in this twisted distorted new world, where Chelsea still average less than 40,000 crowds in the modern day, we are all supposed to believe/pretend that the West London pretenders are this huge well supported club…