Safe standing at Bradford

[Jerry St Clair]

The Bradford City Managing Director has asked Bradford fans to submit practical proposals for a small standing area in Valley Parade and would be willing to consider it on the basis that it meets regulatory and safety requirements. The main Bradford supporters group say they intend to submit one.

Quite unlikely considering that current requirements say "no standing", but it's interesting in that he's the first senior executive of a football league club to publicly support the principle of safe-standing. Will be really interesting to see how the FLA respond to the proposal.

[who are ya?]

Fair play to him. Would love to see it happen but I just can't see it to be honest.

[Rex]

If getting past all the elf n safety requirements and by ticking all the boxes - safe standing could easily be achieved. The question is how much support would this get from other clubs supporters organisations. Clearly the desire for manageable standing areas is there.

[Dirk Gently]

Slowly the closed ranks of football are breaking against this. The FLA have so much power that no-one will ever criticise them or support safe-standing - before now. Privately, though, many are in favour - even some at Reading - but it's rare for anyone to break ranks. The CEO of Everton has privately said he wants a safe-standing area at their new ground, but won't repeat that in public.

Despite everyone knowing that a clear majority of supporters want safe -standing areas - even those who don't want to stand themselves - the message coming from Government and the football industry is that "there's no demand" - but that consensus is starting to break down. Witness the Lib Dems vote in support this summer - yes they're never going to get elected, but that break the all-part consensus and turns this into an election issue now.

Bradford is an interesting case, too - because they were in Tiers 1 & 2 the regulations of all-seating still apply to them, despite now being in Tier 4, which is patently ludicrous. It's effectively saying that it's safe to stand at a ground of a club that's never played top level football, but in exactly the same division it's not safe to stand at the ground of a club that has!

Also, Bradford is interesting in this context because not only is it the ground of the FSF portfolio-holder for safe-standing, it's also in the constituency of Sports Minister Gerry Sutcliffe, who has government responsibility for this issue. There's been a lot of campaigning put into this issue here.