Dundee owners Tim Keyes and John Nelms have bought the club’s home of 124 years.
They plan to build a new home on a site at Camperdown Park.
It’s been a long, drawn-out process to buy Dens from John Bennett, the man who stepped in to help the club in its hour of need in 2009 and has held ownership of the ground until it was able to go back to the Dark Blues.
The club’s owners described it as a “significant step” towards realising their dream of seeing Dundee Football Club play at a new 15,000-seater stadium.
So what’s next?
Courier Sport’s Dundee FC writer George Cran sat down with managing director John Nelms for an exclusive interview at the club’s Gardyne Campus before he spoke to the rest of the media.
GC: Buying Dens Park has taken some time, has it been a difficult process?
JN: “It’s like anything else, it takes time and we have to solve a lot of problems.
“A lot of problems arose throughout the purchase of it and we eventually got to the point where we could purchase it.
“A lot of credit goes to John Bennett. He’s been a strong proponent of Scottish football and a friend to us and the football club.
“We can’t thank him enough. Not only during the dark days but also during Covid, he stepped up and really helped the club out.
“We should also remember Jack Robertson was part of this early on, chairman of Thorntons.
“He was a Dundee fan and advised us in the early days quite a bit.
“But he also talked about how we should purchase the stadium. He really helped kickstart this years ago.”
GC: You have been close to purchasing Dens on a few occasions, what has changed now?
JN: “When you are buying a company that is 14 years old, you have to dig through those company accounts.
“We bought the company that owns Dens Park and that takes time.
“We finally just got to the point where we could press the button.”
GC: So, what’s next?
JN: “What’s next has been worked on forever.
“We’ve been working on the stadium project for years and years now.
“We are getting very very close to having the planning application in for the stadium.
“Our development team meets every Monday and we go through all the issues.
“It looks like we think we have solved just about all of the issues to the point where we think the application is very solid and ready to go in.
“We think it will be fantastic for the city and will raise the profile of the city again, like the V&A did.
“Bring in big concerts, big acts to the city as well as jobs and the economic increase to the city will be fantastic.
“All of that real information will come out during the application process.
“That’s the next steps.
“Purchasing Dens was always one of the steps. We had to get control of Dens so we didn’t have a long-term lease hanging over us if we were moving stadium.
“The way we thought we could get control of it was by purchasing Dens.”
GC: Is the plan still to sell Dens Park to help fund the new stadium? Is ground sharing still an option?
JN: “It doesn’t have to happen before.
“Whatever happens, the stadium itself would have to be started for us to ever move out of Dens.
“We are going down a different path.”
GC: Is finance in place for the new stadium?
JN: “We won’t have that until the application is completed.
“There is a lot to have to happen before we have finance in place.
“We have people who want to finance it, we have those type of things ready to go.
“But we won’t have finance in place until the time where there are shovels in the ground.
“We are constantly speaking to those people about that.”
GC: Has anything in the plans changed since the public consultation?
JN: “The elements of the plans are the same. We have modified how they look and where they are.
“Because we have gone through the public consultation, we have listened to what people said and re-orientated some things trying to make it a better project.”
GC: Road access to the new stadium has been highlighted as an issue. Where are you on that front?
JN: “We’ve been working with the access and how we ingress and egress off the site.
“There has been a ton of work put in on that front.
“And we wouldn’t put the application in if we didn’t have it solved.
“People have to remember this is not new traffic.
“A football match at Dens brings traffic through this area just the same. This just stops the traffic sooner.
“We’re not going through a residential area to get to a football match and there are benefits to that.”
What if owners decide to leave?
GC: Dens Park is now owned by Dark Blue Property Holdings, the new stadium will be in the same hands and not by the club itself. What happens if you and Tim decide to leave?
JN: “I’ve been here 10 years so it’s a strange question to us.
“We just invested another big chunk of change into the organisation so why in the world would we step away from it now?
“If someone walked in with a couple hundred million pounds, would we walk away? Probably!
“We’re invested in the city, invested in this project, invested in Dundee Football Club.
“Everything we do is to benefit Dundee Football Club.
“Trying to answer what ifs is hard.
“I moved my family across, my kids identify as Scottish, we’re dual citizens now. We’re not going anywhere.
“I don’t know how to answer that because we don’t even think of that.
“Look at what’s happened since we’ve been here – training at Dawson Park, we had to rebuild bridges to train at other places. Now we are light years ahead of where we were 10 years ago.
“To be fair, we’re frustrated because we thought we were ahead of the game in building the stadium but now we’re behind the game.
“We bought that land in 2016 and our original plan wasn’t to look for land until 2020.
“We thought we were ahead of the game then but we’re still playing that game unfortunately.”
When?
The planning permission application is expected to be submitted by the end of the calendar year.
In the press conference that followed this interview, Nelms said: “I would love for us to be kicking a ball no later than the summer of 2025.
“That’s still a push but that’s where I would like us to be.”
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