More Manchester United: Sebastian Coe, the chair of the Old Trafford Regeneration Task Force, has admitted that the timeline on the project is “slightly uncertain” but believes that the work to build Manchester United’s new stadium is ‘moving in the right direction.’

Speaking on The Sports Agents podcast, Lord Coe admits he was pleased to be brought into the Old Trafford regeneration project by Sir Jim Ratcliffe and Andy Burnham. “Look, I love regeneration projects, and I was really pleased to be asked to get involved in that,”he says. “I do actually believe in good locally funded projects to make lives easier for local people. And I also saw from the London model that if you build it around sport, the multiplier impact of getting other stuff done is far quicker than it would have been.

“Land acquisition is always complicated. I know that from London. So, at this moment, it’s just putting the stuff together sequentially and incrementally and using a world class stadium to be a catalyst for so many other things, including inward investment,” he says. “So, it’s about jobs, it’s about housing, it’s about educational aspiration. And I’ve seen sport so often used properly, changing local landscapes, and this is an exciting project.

“It’s slightly uncertain at the moment. The stadium is being scoped and being improperly scaled. But again, that is also dependent on the purchasing and the acquisition of various other parcels of land in that space,” he says. “That’s all taking place at the moment, and I won’t maintain a running commentary on that. But we’re moving in the right direction.”