Team is a priority over stadium - Gold

Birmingham chairman David Gold has insisted that funding the playing side and ensuring the club remain in the Barclaycard Premiership must take priority at present over completing redevelopment work at St Andrews.

The Blues have revamped three sides of the ground since Gold and co-owner David Sullivan took charge a decade ago.

There are also ambitious plans to eventually carry out work on the main stand which would increase the ground capacity.

But Gold insisted that any moves in that direction have to take second best to ensuring that finances are available to manager Steve Bruce.

He said: “We do have a desire to complete the stadium. That is something we promised and we hope to do that sometime in the future.

“But what is more important at this time is to fund the playing staff and ensure we are a Premiership club.

“If you look around there are many examples of clubs who have built fantastic new stadiums and they are out of business so you have to be very careful.

“We’ve got to be sensible and prudent and we mustn’t run away with our dreams. We all want to see St Andrews completed but we’ve got to get our priorities right.”

Gold also insisted that Blues fans need to demonstrate that the redesigned stadium would be sold out every match to justify the expenditure.

He said: “As soon as we can get a finished stadium, one of the things you would need is a full house week in and week out – and we’ve not been able to do that right at this time.

“From a realistic point of view, you need to have a situation where you’ve got two or three thousand fans that can’t get in to see the match.

“Then that gives you the driving factor to build a new stadium because you can say although we’re spending a lot, you are going to have the extra fans to help make it financially viable.”