Following our first home league fixture of the season against Portsmouth, we wanted to provide a further update on Imps Territory and some of the wider matchday feedback from supporters.
Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to share feedback with us. The Imps Territory work, together with the wider stadium developments undertaken this summer, represents a significant change to the matchday environment at the ProAmpac Stadium. While everyone is immensely proud of what has been delivered, we recognise that there will be areas to refine as supporters begin to use the new spaces and we better understand how they operate in practice on a busy matchday.
Seating in the Fan Village
One of the most consistent pieces of feedback has been around additional seating within the Fan Village. It has always been our intention to introduce fixed seating into the area, but we also want to allow a period of reflection before finalising the layout, so that we can properly understand how supporters move around and use the space when at its busiest.
From Tueday’s fixture, we will therefore introduce temporary seating throughout the Fan Village. We will continue to review this match by match before settling on the longer-term configuration.
We will also be adding several ‘belly bars’ around the columns, providing additional places for supporters to rest drinks and food. Again, this was always part of the intended design but simply fell outside what we were able to complete ahead of the first fixture.
Big screen
We are continuing to fine-tune how the new big screen is used as part of the wider matchday experience. This will inevitably evolve over the coming weeks and months as we test different content, timings and uses. It was fantastic, however, to see the reaction to the pre-match video against Portsmouth, which incorporated the air-raid siren and some key moments from the club’s history.
We are also working on ways to introduce a permanent running match clock within the stadium. Our current focus is on installing this within the Rilmac Stand mid-tier LED advertising ribbon. We are working hard to have this operational after the international break.
The View hospitality suite (Upper Rilmac)
We remain unable to open the hospitality suite in the Upper Rilmac Stand for Tuesday’s fixture. This follows remedial works that were required to the fire curtain system within the suite. We believe those works were completed and appropriately certified by the subject matter experts on Friday but, with the bank holiday weekend, Building Control have not yet been able to review the supporting documentation and, as a result, we have not received the relevant approval to open the hospitality area.
The seating within the Upper Rilmac Stand will remain open and available as normal. We fully appreciate the disappointment this will cause, particularly for those affected by the closure at our previous fixture. We will continue to work closely with Building Control and do everything we can to secure the necessary approval as soon as possible.
Reopening teething problems
We also acknowledge the opening fixture exposed several reopening teething problems across the stadium.
The scale and pace of the summer works meant large areas of an ageing stadium had effectively been shut down and then brought back online within a very compressed period.
The ProAmpac Stadium is not a modern, centrally controlled venue where every piece of infrastructure feeds through a single building-management system. During the works, contractors had understandably needed to isolate water supplies, electrical systems, pumps and other infrastructure across different parts of the ground.
In some cases, issues only became apparent once the stadium was fully operational and being occupied by 10,000 people simultaneously.
There were also some much simpler shortcomings. Because the stadium was handed back and prepared so late in the programme, some areas had not been stocked with basic supplies to the standard we would expect, including items such as toilet roll.
Those are straightforward things we should have got right, and we have reviewed the preparation process ahead of future fixtures.
Despite those challenges, everyone remains incredibly proud of everything that was achieved during an extraordinarily demanding summer programme.
Team members, contractors, partners, and volunteers have undertaken a huge amount of work to transform significant parts of the stadium within a very short window, and we are enormously grateful to everyone involved.
We are equally grateful to supporters for their patience, understanding and constructive feedback.
The stadium and the matchday experience will continue to evolve. The team will keep listening, keep learning and keep refining things game by game as we better understand the dynamics of the new spaces.
Thank you, as always, for your continued support.