It'll be sad to leave Dens Park - but it's time to move on

I’ve never been a fan of the international break. The enforced suspension of league hostilities isn’t as bad when Steve Clarke’s men are on the brink of qualification, but typically, it either breaks up a good run of form or leaves you stewing for an extra week over a poor performance.

On this occasion, my impatience to get back to club matters has only been amplified by our most recent game against Ross County falling victim to last weekend’s torrid weather. The extra week off will help some, like on-loan defender Aaron Donnelly, work his way back into contention from injury, but it will also add to what was already a packed fixture list in the run up to Christmas.

The torrential rain clearly had some appreciation of narrative, though, as it chose to arrive and make the Dens pitch unplayable in the week that a major milestone in our mooted move away from Dens took place. After what has felt like an eternity of speculation, Dark Blue Property Holdings - the separate company owned by Tim Keyes and John Nelms - announced that it had acquired Sandeman Properties from well-known Scottish businessman and football man John Bennett. Sandeman Properties’ main (if not only) property was Dens Park, bought and leased back by Bennett in 2009 to help the club manage its finances.

For the first time in nearly 15 years, Dens is now owned by the club’s current owners, clearing the way for the old ground to be sold as part of the move to what surely has to be called the “Nou Campy” on the edge of Camperdown Park. Importantly, this deal led John Nelms to confirm that Dundee FC will not need to ground share if and when the proposed new stadium is being built, removing one source of instability and uncertainty in the process.  

The stadium is only one part of the club’s ambitious proposal, the latest iteration of which also encompassed new housing, commercial and retail outlets, expanded hospitality and a new crematorium for the city. All of this is designed to provide alternative revenue streams for the owners to help support the club, as well as addressing the challenges posed by our current digs.

As much as I love Dens and its idiosyncrasies, I’ll say the quiet part out loud; as a stadium for a top flight side, Dens is done for. Built over a century ago at a time (and, ironically, at what was then the city outskirts), Dens contains a lot of history and its fair share of ghosts, too. As you’d expect, the years haven’t been kind to the stadium, which at its most recent estimate required £250,000 expenditure each season just to remain in its current, dilapidated condition. The heroic efforts of the “two Brians” and the other groundsmen to keep the exposed pitch in decent nick throughout hard Scottish winters can only last for so long, even with the recently installed improved drainage system. With the vast majority of non-playing staff now based at the Gardyne campus in the east of the city, the stadium essentially only exists to provide a pitch every second Saturday; an essential for any football club, obviously, but in the modern era, it’s a throwback and massively inefficient.

Some argue that moving off to the western edge of the city is using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, and that it would be cheaper and easier to redevelop the stadium where it currently sits. I’m no civil engineer or project manager, but I have my doubts it would be. Bringing Dens up to the standard it should be would, in practice, surely mean rebuilding and reshaping the entire footprint, a job that couldn’t be done in a summer and would therefore either need to be done in stages (to great disruption) or in one go, necessitating ground sharing and introducing even more disruption, leaving us at the mercy of construction work. There’s also the spectre of previously mooted redevelopments - ice rink and a greyhound track, anyone?

What will undoubtedly be impacted, though, is the character of match day itself. The custodians of the Clep, Frew’s and Whites will no doubt be concerned by the loss of fortnightly income from Dundee fans, win, lose or draw; in the vast majority of cases, fans will have to travel to the Nou Campy by bus or car rather than some getting there on foot as they currently do, which poses environmental, logistical and practical questions to be addressed. Dundee derbies - whenever United manage to make it out of the championship - will lose the famous walk down the street, and pub quiz masters across the land will have to update their “nearest stadiums” questions. While the club has said that some elements of the current stadium will be incorporated into the new stadium, it’s harder to move those other intangible elements of its current location.

In the round, though, I view the move as sad but necessary - the footballing equivalent of kids leaving the nest. There are numerous questions and details that can only be answered or even emerge for scrutiny once the planning application is submitted by the end of the calendar year, and no doubt some of the more ambitious elements of the embryonic plans seen to date may be curtailed or changed in the meantime. If the new stadium is going to be ready for the first game of the 2025/26 season as Nelms suggested as an optimistic aim, then I have a feeling we’ll be revisiting this topic a lot in the months ahead.