Scheme had been due to complete next month
Liverpool has said that its new Anfield Road stand won’t now be fully completed by Buckingham until October.
The £80m stand, designed by KSS, will add an extra 7,000 seats to the ground, bringing the ground’s capacity up to 61,000.
Work had been planned to finish in time for the start of the new Premier League season next month – with Liverpool’s first home game against Bournemouth taking place on 19 August.
The job started in September 2021 after it was delayed by a year in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic but in an update earlier today, the club said only the lower tier would be open for the Bournemouth game with the upper tier completed in October.
Andy Hughes, managing director, Liverpool FC, said: “Unfortunately, the upper tier of the Anfield Road Stand is not quite ready for the Bournemouth game. Buckingham will therefore work with Liverpool City Council’s licensing team to deliver a phased opening process.
“As with any complex major construction project of this scale, there are always so many variables and challenges along the way.”
Seven years ago, the club was forced to play the first three games of that season away from Anfield after Carillion was late completing the £75m main stand.
>>See also: To refurb or rebuild: what next for Old Trafford?
Carillion had pipped Buckingham to that scheme but since then Carillion has gone bust and Buckingham become a go-to stand builder for football clubs.
Most recently, the contractor has built Fulham’s new Riverside stand which has opened to fans although fit-out work on a range of amenities such as bars and restaurants is not expected to be fully complete until next year.
In its last set of results, Buckingham said it racked up a £14.2m loss on an unnamed stadium job – thought to be the new stand at Fulham’s Craven Cottage ground – which helped send the firm nosediving to a pre-tax loss of £10.7m for 2021.
It said that more than half of the money it lost on Fulham was down to the failure of a subcontractor on the job – believed to be roofing firm Kaicer, which was installing an aluminium standing seam roofing system on the new Riverside stand.
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