Manchester City has capitalized £178,600,000 against the expansion of the Etihad Stadium.
That is the carrying amount disclosed in the audited accounts of Manchester City Football Club Limited, company number 00040946, at 30 June 2025. A year earlier it was £59,600,000. Both figures are in the same note, both are audited, and both have been at Companies House since March 2026.
They do not tell you what the stadium cost. The same sentence that gives the number explains why.
What the club says
Manchester City announced the project in its own words on 18 April 2024.
The £300million project, which will increase the stadium’s capacity to over 60,000 during the 2025/26 season, is now starting to take shape with the initial steel framework in place.
The next paragraph of that release is the one that matters for anybody trying to price a stand.
The expansion, which is centred around the North Stand, will see the Club develop a 3,000-capacity fan zone, a 400-bed hotel, a new club shop and a museum.
So the £300m buys a stand, a hotel, a shop, a museum and a fan zone. The question this piece set out to answer was how much of it is the stadium. The accounts are the only documents that could settle it, and they decline to.
Where the number is
Note 13 of the accounts to 30 June 2025, verbatim:
The balance in assets under the course of construction primarily relates to the North Stand Expansion and the Manchester Entertainment District, with elements of the project scheduled to open in phases throughout 2026. The carrying amount of the project at 30 June 2025 was £178.6m (2024: £59.6m).
One carrying amount, two developments, no split. The stand and the entertainment district are a single line in the only filing that names either of them.
That is not an oversight. It is how the club has chosen to disclose a project it describes publicly as one thing, and under accounting standards it is perfectly orthodox. It simply means the decomposition everyone wants does not exist in any document.
The series
Assets under the course of construction, at cost, from notes 12 and 13 of the five filings to 30 June 2025. All figures in thousands of pounds.
| Year to 30 June | Opening | Additions | Reclassified out | Closing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 3,020 | 1,706 | (1,346) | 3,380 |
| 2022 | 3,380 | 1,456 | (2,894) | 1,942 |
| 2023 | 1,942 | 15,229 | (1,215) | 15,956 |
| 2024 | 15,956 | 64,528 | (6,703) | 73,781 |
| 2025 | 73,781 | 122,408 | (4,965) | 191,224 |
Additions across the five years total £205,327,000, which is our arithmetic and is not the project cost. The column covers all stadium infrastructure, and the reclassifications move finished items out into other asset classes as they come into use.
The whole of the club’s property shows the same shape.
| Year to 30 June | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Net book value, £000 | 312,457 | 310,937 | 319,834 | 378,582 | 492,032 |
Flat, then falling, then three years of acceleration: £8.9m, £58.7m, £113.5m. The build arrives in the balance sheet in the year to June 2023 and has not stopped since.
The disclosure appears only when the money does
Reading the five filings in sequence, the striking thing is how little the club said until it had to.
| Year to 30 June | What the note says about assets under construction |
|---|---|
| 2021 | nothing |
| 2022 | ”relates to stadium infrastructure projects” |
| 2023 | nothing |
| 2024 | ”relates to stadium infrastructure projects” |
| 2025 | names the North Stand Expansion and the Manchester Entertainment District, with a combined figure |
The £59.6m attributed to the project in the year to June 2024 is not in the 2024 accounts at all. It exists only as the comparative printed alongside the 2025 figure, a year later. Before the 2025 filing there was no filed number for this project anywhere.
One further line is new in 2025:
The amount of borrowing costs capitalised during as at 30 June 2025 was £5.9m (2024: Nil)
So £5.9m of the £178.6m is interest, capitalized into the asset rather than charged against profit. The rate is benchmarked to the Secured Overnight Financing Rate, a US dollar rate, on a building in east Manchester.
What the figure actually is
To be precise about what exists, because this piece is about measurement: nobody has published what the stadium cost. What has been filed is the audited carrying amount of a project inside a football club’s property, plant and equipment, and that project is a stand and a hotel and a shop and a museum at once.
The first three stadiums in this series could be read cleanly because each was built through a single-purpose company. Tottenham Hotspur Stadium Limited, Everton Stadium Development Limited and London Stadium LLP exist to hold one asset, so their accounts answer the question by construction. Manchester City has no such company. We searched Companies House for a stadium vehicle and found none. The one candidate with a promising name, Manchester City Investments Limited, has filed dormant accounts every year since 2019 and holds nothing at all.
That is the difference between a club that owns its ground and builds it through a vehicle, and a club expanding a stadium inside its own accounts. It is also why this figure comes with a caveat the others did not need.
Per seat, and why not to use it
The expansion adds roughly 7,900 seats and takes the Etihad past 60,000. Divide the announced £300m by the seats and you get £37,975 each.
| Ground | Figure | Basis | Per seat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tottenham Hotspur Stadium | £1,156,740,741 | audited total | £18,405 |
| Hill Dickinson Stadium | £851,237,998 | audited, not final | £16,131 |
| Etihad North Stand | £300,000,000 announced | programme | not meaningful |
£37,975 would be more than double Tottenham’s. It is printed here so that it can be refused. A programme figure divided by seats prices a hotel, a museum and a shop as though they were seating, and every table on this site carries a basis column precisely so that comparison cannot be made quietly.
What these filings will not say
They will not say how much of the £300m is the stadium. They will not say what the hotel cost, because the hotel has never appeared as a figure in any filing. They will not say what the project finally cost, because it was open at the year end and phases run through 2026. They carry no capacity figure, so they cannot tell you what the £178.6m bought in seats. And they do not test the £300m, which the club has not restated and the auditors were never asked to check.
The accounts also never mention Manchester City Council or the terms of the stadium lease. What they carry instead is £121,050,000 of leasehold improvements at cost and £96,379,000 of right-of-use assets, which is the shape of a tenant’s balance sheet rather than an owner’s.
The year to 30 June 2026 is the first that can carry a completion figure. On the club’s recent filing pattern it reaches Companies House around March 2027.
Sources
- Manchester City Football Club Limited, company 00040946: the filing history, full accounts for every year ended 30 June from 2021 to 2025. The property, plant and equipment note carries the assets under construction series, the project carrying amount, the capitalized borrowing costs and the leasehold figures.
- Manchester City Investments Limited, company 04513353: the filing history, which establishes that the one entity whose name suggests it might hold the stadium has filed dormant accounts every year since 2019 and holds nothing.
- Manchester City: “Manchester City marks key phase for Etihad Stadium expansion and entertainment destination”, 18 April 2024. The £300m figure and the description of what the project contains, both quoted above.
- Tottenham Hotspur Stadium Limited, company 10151725 and Everton Stadium Development Limited, company 10719054: used for the per seat comparison, as read in the earlier pieces in this series.
Filings at Companies House are served as scanned PDFs with no text layer, so every figure here was read from the scanned page rather than extracted. Arithmetic was checked by confirming that opening balance plus additions and reclassifications equals the closing balance in each of the five years. Every year closes.
Hero photo: the North Stand expansion under construction by Mr Ignavy, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons, cropped.
Capacities are the verified figures on our own stadium pages. Where a published figure and a filed figure measure different things, this piece states both and names the document each came from. An announced programme cost and a capitalized project balance are two different measurements, and neither is a cost per seat.
