The plans for the 'new Old Trafford' look impressive, as they should for a 100,000-seater stadium that will cost billions. Sir Jim Ratcliffe believes a new stadium for Manchester United will make the club the most profitable in the world in the coming years after a string of controversial cost-cutting measures that have dominated his first year in co-ownership. After a lengthy consultation process and canvassing of fans, Ratcliffe has decided to pursue a new state-of-the-art stadium next to Old Trafford rather than the costly process of expanding and fixing their current home. Ratcliffe estimates that the new stadium would add billions to the UK economy, despite it likely costing billions to build. It comes with Manchester City in the middle of a £300m expansion of the Etihad Stadium across town to take their capacity to more than 60,000. With the new Co-op Live arena now open next door at the Etihad Campus, City are pushing a new name for their corner of East Manchester - the 'Entertainment District'. United will hope that regenerating Old Trafford and its surrounding areas will offer a rival on the other side of the city With a potential stadium capacity of 160,000 over the two stadiums, plus around 46,000 across the two indoor arenas in the city, Manchester could soon have stadia holding more than 200,000 spectators if the Old Trafford plans go ahead. But this is not the first time the city has tried to boost it's stadium offering, with the last attempt coming almost 30 years ago when Manchester attempted to build a 'Wembley of the North' that could hold FA Cup and Champions League finals. Having bid to host the 1996 Olympic Games, proposing an 80,000 seater stadium on a greenfield site in West Manchester, the city shifted focus to the 2000 games when the location for the proposed stadium moved east to Eastlands, a derelict area ripe for regeneration. By 1992, with new government legislation for urban renewal opening up funds to purchase the site, plans were well under way, but that bid was again unsuccessful so Manchester turned its attention to the 2002 Commonwealth Games. There was a proposal to the Millennium Commission for the stadium to become a Millennium Stadium but that was turned down. In 1995 Manchester won the right to host the Commonwealths at the Eastlands site. So in 1996 Manchester bid for £150m of government funding for a national stadium at a time when the future of Wembley was being discussed. Manchester proposed that the Commonwealth Games stadium could be reconfigured into a national football stadium to rival or even replace Wembley. That bid was rejected in 1997, so the final design for the stadium was watered then down to a 38,000-seater arena for the Commonwealth Games. Some aspects of the original Olympics design were retained with the now-iconic spires that wrap around the Etihad a key feature of the design that was shelved. The attempts to get the National Stadium were another unsuccessful chapter in Manchester's long-running stadium saga, however the rebuild of Wembley cost more than £800m and encountered years of delays. Instead, Manchester built the City of Manchester Stadium for £110m and then converted it to a football ground. The original 80,000-seat design had been costed at £150m. In his book, Bernstein revealed how the original designs for the football stadium after conversion were for a larger capacity. He wrote: "In those early days of discussions, the stadium’s capacity was set at around 60,000. I suggested it should be nearer 70,000. I wrote: ‘This capacity might enable lower prices to be charged, thereby maximising the chances of filling the stadium for major non-MCFC events. A smaller capacity (say 50,000) could enhance the perception that the stadium is being built for MCFC as opposed to being “The Stadium of the North”.’ "The council and Sport England paid the capital costs of the stadium and we paid for its fitting-out to become a football ground." Comments from board member Alistair Mackintosh in Bernstein's book note that City took a loan of £43m for the conversion. Reporting has since suggested that the council spent £22m of taxpayers money on removing the running track, converting the stadium to a football ground, and City took over the stadium in 2003 on a 250-year lease. Manchester City Council own the stadium and charge City rent for use of the venue. Originally, as Bernstein explained, the rent was based on attendances, worth about £2m per year for the council. In 2011 City renegotiated the agreement to pay an annual lump sum, enabling them to sell the stadium naming rights to Etihad in a 10-year arrangement. MEN Sport understands that City pay a fixed base rent plus additional payments reflecting a share of the naming rights and the club’s progress in Europe. Those rates are understood to go up annually in line with inflation, earning the council around £6m in the 2022/23 season. Money raised from City's rental agreement is directly paid back to supporting sports facilities in east Manchester and elsewhere in the city. It is understood that this is part of a ‘waterfall’ arrangement where profits from sports facilities created for the Commonwealth Games in Manchester support and sustain any non-profit-making sports facilities. Schemes created from this include the East Manchester Leisure Centre in Beswick, the Clayton Vale mountain bike trail, the BMX track at the National Cycling Centre and the National Basketball performance centre in Belle Vue. The agreement allows City to invest in the stadium, as they did with the 2014 expansion of the South Stand and are currently doing to expand the North Stand to take capacity to more than 60,000, which will see City earn more money from hospitality, commercial opportunities and ticket sales. City hope to open the expanded North Stand at the Etihad to supporters in January 2026, with the adjoining new hotel set for a mid-2026 opening. There will also be a fan zone, club museum, office space and roof walk. Speaking last year, Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham discussed Ratcliffe's initial ambitions for a new stadium, and the comparison to the Etihad, saying: "I have supported City and the city region has supported Manchester City and they have put a lot of funding into East Manchester and that should be recognised. "The wider development around the Etihad is unbelievable. You think of the public money that created the stadium in that instance but they have sunk a lot of money into the facilities around that ground. That area is utterly transformed from the place I remember when I was growing up in these parts. "And we would have exactly the same relationship with Manchester United. If on the west of Greater Manchester you have United at the heart of a new campus of facilities that links to Media City and the east of the city you have Manchester City, who continue to build out from the Etihad with a new massive indoor arena going in there. Just think about that. "No other city in the world would be set up in terms of its football infrastructure to Manchester. No one would come close. This is why I will give this task force everything we have got to help because the benefits to our city region are massive if we unlock them. It’s not for show."