May 3 2017

Steve Parish

Crystal Palace chairman Steve Parish says the club's plans for a new Main Stand are being held up by "extortionate" demands from a third party.

Palace want to extend the stand behind the current structure and add an extra tier to it – in the same way Liverpool have done recently – which would increase Selhurst Park's capacity to around 33,000.

Though Parish did not name Sainsbury's, which owns the car park behind the stand, he revealed that negotiations to buy the land in order for construction to start are proving to be tough.

Speaking to BT Sport, he said: "Anybody that's been around the stadium knows how constrained with space we are. So it's been very difficult trying to get to a scheme that we think will work.

"Unfortunately we've got people on the site that did promise us help, who are now seeing pound signs and want us to pay extortionate amounts of money for small slithers of car park. For most of the supporters it's probably not too hard to work out where that is.

"So unfortunately, we need to own the land to build the thing on, that we don't at the moment. So that's the negotiations that are going on.

"I've often said, as impatient the fans are for news, there's no point in me putting nice models in reception or putting things out there that we can't actually do. So we want to very make sure that we have a good chance to complete the project before we put it out into the public domain."

Palace have looked into building a stadium on a new site in the area but believe it could take around a decade to come to fruition and reckon redeveloping Selhurst Park is a much speedier option.

Parish said: "To be honest, it's so difficult now in London to get planning permission for a brand new stadium, you're talking about 10 years' work, so I think [this is] far more sensible. We can get to the capacity we think we'd easily fill – I think 35-40,000 – with the optimism that you would get, we're in London.

"We've already sold this season as many season tickets as we did last season and we've not even finished the season yet, so I think we could fill 35-40,000. We wouldn't be able to do it all in one go anyway.

"If we did the Main Stand, it would take us to 32-33,000, so hopefully we can do it, and hopefully we can do it in a shorter time period than trying to find a new site to build a new stadium, which in central London or the outskirts of London would be very difficult."