A ground is only as big as its exits

Expanding a stadium is rarely a question of adding seats; it is a question of proving people can leave.

Ask why a club stopped its redevelopment at four thousand extra seats when the stand could clearly have taken six, and the answer is almost never the stand. It is the staircase, the vomitory width, the exit gates and the time it takes to clear the bowl in an emergency.

Safety certification runs on flow rates. A given width of exit passes a known number of people per minute, and the whole capacity is derived backwards from that, adjusted for the condition of the structure and the quality of the stewarding. Add seats without adding exit width and you have not built a bigger stadium. You have built an overcrowded one that will be certified at the old number anyway.

This is why capacity fights in old grounds are so bitter and so technical. The seats are cheap. The circulation is not. Widening a stair in a listed structure, or cutting a new exit through a stand that supports the roof, is the expensive half of the project, and it produces nothing a supporter can see or a sponsor can name.

There is a related distortion. Because usable capacity depends on how quickly a section can be cleared and how it is segregated, the away allocation is not just a political number. Separating one set of supporters from another requires its own entry, its own concourse and its own exit route, and those three things are the real reason allocations at some grounds are lower than the visiting club believes it deserves. It is often presented as hostility. Sometimes it is. Frequently it is a corridor.

I think clubs should be far more open about this. Publish the certificate's reasoning. Say plainly that the north stand is capped at this figure because the exit capacity is that figure, and here is what a new stair would cost. Supporters can handle engineering constraints. What they cannot handle is a vague statement about safety that could equally be covering a decision to keep hospitality lounges where a stairwell should go.

Every seat added is a person who must get out. That sentence is the whole discipline, and it is why the most consequential drawing in any stadium expansion is not the one with the roof on it.