A renovated football stadium for Telstar, but preferably also with catering facilities in it and homes around it. Two (former) top men of the football club are trying to achieve this in collaboration with the municipality of Velsen.
“People like our club, I believe, don’t they?” Former commercial director and project leader Hammerstein asks general director Pieter de Waard half-jokingly. The question arises of who should pay for the plans. De Waard looks at his dress shoes as he smiles as he slides sand back and forth across the tiles next to the football club’s field.
Telstar will need that club love to take the first step in the renovation of its own BUKO stadium. Because sponsors and supporters will have to want to buy bonds to repair the grandstand on the long east side of the field with, among other things, a ‘promenade’a new supporters home and not to forget: beautiful sanitary facilities.
“It’s clean,” says De Waard at the old, yellowed toilet building near the branch. “But not of this time anymore.” It is one of the signs that the stadium is ready for some new impulses.
Plan east stand Telstar 1
Plan east stand Telstar 2
Plan east stand Telstar 3
The renovated east stand should attract more visitors, and thus ultimately generate more money. At least, that’s how it went according to Hammerstein with the renovated grandstand on the other side of the long side of the stadium.
The profit must then go to a new north and south stands on the short sides. It is not clear when the entire renovated stadium should be ready. There are still too many uncertainties for that.
What is clear is that the renewal plans should not only benefit Telstar. For example, the intention is to also provide catering in or near the north stand, as well as facilities for, among others, the football amateurs of VV IJmuiden, whose club is located behind the head of the field. An underground parking garage shared with the Stadsschouwburg Velsen is also mentioned in the plans.
“In some parts of the stadium you really have to close your eyes”
In any case, the municipality of Velsen is already thinking along. Like so many municipalities in the Netherlands, there is one thing they really want and need: to build new homes. And here around the stadium she sees an opportunity.
“When we knocked on the door of the municipality with our stadium plans in 2019, it came back to us with four scenarios,” Hammerstein explains. “We prefer a combination of two of those scenarios with all kinds of project development, such as the construction of about two hundred homes around the stadium, and a stadium with a so-called ‘iconic appearance’.” It is still unclear exactly what this will all look like.
The idea of immediately tackling the entire area around the stadium isn’t just selfless on the part of the Telstar guys, “it also means there will be ‘other cost-bearers’ besides Telstar,” said Hammerstein, who is officially retired and says he does this job ‘because he lives two hundred meters from the stadium’.
They are not completely crazy in IJmuiden
And the plans are very serious. People like to laugh a lot at Telstar, partly because of countless low rankings at the lowest professional level in the Netherlands. But they are not completely crazy in IJmuiden. The club has, as De Waard puts it with a shrug: ‘not much money, but it is healthy’. Not every football club in the Netherlands can say that.
In addition, Andries Jonker, ex-assistant of Louis van Gaal at Barcelona and Bayern Munich, has been a coach there for three years. Michael van Praag, former chairman of Ajax and director of the European Football Association, is leading the way with regard to making the stadium more sustainable, with which Telstar and four other clubs are at the forefront of Dutch football.
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So don’t rule out De Waard and Hammerstein if they put Telstar’s promotion to the Eredivisie in 2026, and the step-by-step construction of a renovated stadium and environment as dots on the horizon. De Waard: “Emmen came over the promotion in 2018 as number seven, and coincidentally we were even one place above that club this year.”
The club then hastily put together a special committee during the season, which had to answer the question: what if Telstar is promoted. With the current dated stadium, it could turn out to be a Pyrrhic victory.
Walk-in evening
A new stadium does not only offer ‘opportunities for multifunctional project development’, as the saying goes. Except for the beautiful entrance, the BUKO stadium is simply an old gang, making an unforeseen promotion almost impossible. As Hammerstein puts it: “In some parts of the stadium you really have to close your eyes.”
In order to get local residents on board with the plans, Telstar is organizing a walk-in evening on 9 May, so that they can have the plans properly explained by De Waard and Hammerstein. “And maybe very good suggestions will come out of it,” hopes the latter.
He likes to keep the momentum going. The first step of the ambitious project, the east stand with promenade, could be completed by the end of next season if all goes well, he thinks. “The municipality says it will make a decision about the land before the summer. Then the building permit applications will be ready to be submitted, and construction will take about eight months.”