Former Walt Disney chief executive Michael Eisner completed his takeover of Portsmouth FC on Thursday, confirming the club will continue to play at the 100-year-old Fratton Park.
Eisner’s Tornante Company offered £5.67m to buy the club and will invest an extra £10m.
Eisner said a man who oversaw the design of Disney parks in Paris and Hong Kong will visit the stadium to see what improvements can be made.
He said the character of the stadium is something that should be protected and said he had no desire to build a new modern facility.
Eisner said: “Hopefully the team will run, the club will run in an efficient way and that we can use what we’ve committed to and maybe even more down the line to obviously safety of the Fratton Park, we’re going to stay at Fratton Park. Of course we want to expand capacity there over time. We want to improve the academy but we also want to run it intelligently so over a long period of time, it will be clear that this is one of the major clubs in the UK. Now that’s going to take a while.
“I have a couple of people that used to work with me at Disney coming over to walk the grounds on Sunday to see what the long-term vision of the whole area could be. I don’t see us building a modern stadium – we don’t have to copy everybody else. we didn’t do it in Anaheim when we did the baseball team, we did do it for the hockey team but Fratton Park has a feeling that you could really screw up by arrogantly thinking you could improve it.
“We can improve it by filling in the corners maybe, by maybe making a new stand, by certainly making it totally safe, modern inside – wifi video and all that stuff but you wouldn’t rebuild Queen Victoria’s house, Osborne House – I’ve just been there Isle of Wight – just to do it. It’s pretty good. So this is very good, as I know, over 100 years old and everybody wants these very fancy stadiums and maybe my grandchildren will think that’s a good idea, right now I like it.”
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