Aston Villa are the latest Premier League club to announce fresh stadium plans as the future of Newcastle United’s St James’ Park remains on hold.

Newcastle United sold St James’ Park to itself for around £130million last year, but any meaningful progress regarding the future or expansion of the stadium is yet to materialise.

Newcastle chief executive officer David Hopkinson confirmed last month that the club are still ‘not ready’ to make a decision or statement regarding the future of St James’ Park. But it was explained by Newcastle’s chief financial officer Simon Capper that the stadium sale to PZ Holdings was partly to do with future of St James’ Park.

Meanwhile, some of Newcastle’s Premier League rivals are moving forward with their stadium plans.

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Aston Villa move forward with stadium plans

Aston Villa have just released a statement confirming that Villa Park will have a reduced capacity of 6,500 to 37,000 for the 2026/27 season as the club accelerates its stadium expansion plans.

Villa confirmed that a temporary closure of the North Stand for the 2026/27 season will ensure a redeveloped stand will be in place for the start of the 2027/28 season, one year earlier than initially planned.

A statement released by Villa said: “The redevelopment supports the Club's broader strategy by increasing overall stadium capacity to over 50,000 and maximising the benefit to the Club and local area of all events held at Villa Park, including UEFA Euro 2028.”

St James’ Park has also been selected as a host stadium for Euro 2028, but no plans are in place to make any major alterations to the stadium in that time.

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St James’ Park sale explained

Explaining the internal sale of St James’ Park, Capper said: “The motivation was very much to reorganise our property assets and get them into the correct legal boxes to allow us to go forward with our potential development, either at St James’ Park or for a new stadium, and to facilitate that with financing and other similar items.

“There may be more similar transactions to come in the future, depending on what we end up doing, but the profit calculation that had to be done is then a consequence of the detail of the accounting rules that the Premier League require us to follow in doing any transaction with a company that is associated with us. So it does create a very significant accounting profit because of that.”

It marked a fresh twist in the long-term debate surrounding the future of Newcastle’s stadium, with a St James’ Park expansion previously considered and a 70,000 capacity new-build on Leazes Park also floated. Other potential locations are also reportedly being assessed.

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