Scottish football's death row prisoner gets another season but plan stays same - farewell Frankenstein's lair

It was not the way for Dens Park to host its last Dundee derby, as some feared might be the case. And it hasn’t, of course. The sides are due to meet again on January 2 at the same stadium.

This will be their 89th meeting at the ground. On the proviso the teams are in either the top or bottom six together, a 90th meeting will take place there as well.

Now, with managing director John Nelms confirming that Dundee will remain at their home since 1899 for at least one more season, there will be a 91st derby, at minimum, there too - assuming both are still in the Premiership (they could, of course, both go down).

The longer it takes to gain approval for Dundee's plans to build a new stadium in the outskirts of the city, the more history is allowed to unfold at a stadium that has been living in fear of the wrecking ball for several years now.

If it were a prisoner on death row, it would be considered cruelty to be left hanging on for so long. “Realistically, it will be at least one more season at Dens,” says Nelms.

The managing director remains bullishly confident that the club's new 12,500-capacity stadium will happen, he just can't say exactly when. A Planning Application, lodged in February, is still waiting for approval in principle.

"We're hopeful that because of the holidays and things of that nature that we're going to have our hearing in January,” he says.

Of course, the planning application outcome, whenever it’s delivered, is not guaranteed to be good news for Dundee, although Nelms is “as confident as we can be”. The usual caveats apply. Dundee fans have become overly familiar with the terms ‘ingress’ and egress’ since they come up in any discussion about the new stadium. Transport Scotland’s concerns about the potential impact vehicles entering and exiting the site will have on traffic on the Kingsway bypass continues to be a sticking point.

Environmental worries are another obstacle. According to Nelms, the environmental assessment study commissioned by Dundee is 15,000 pages long on its own. “And that’s just one aspect,” he says.

Then there’s the vote itself. “From a vote standpoint, we just don't know,” he says. “That depends on who's voting at the time.”

Dundee have received some cheer from the recent green light for a new training ground at Riverside Drive, an initiative delivered by the club’s community trust in conjunction with Riverside West End, a local football club. “We won the vote 15 to 5,” says Nelms. The original plan was to incorporate the training ground at the new stadium site. Around 100 people objected. “We listened,” says Nelms. The City Council proposed a different location.

Nelms is hopeful of beginning work on the site, which includes a 3G pitch with floodlights and two storey building, this summer. It gives the club a “visible but invisible” footprint in the city.

“(It will be) shrouded in plant life and such like to kind of hide it,” he says. “We've been asked to do that, but the reality is everybody will know it's there. As you come into the city - there's two ways, the lower road or the upper road - you'll see Dundee Football Club, and we'll have a presence in the city for sure.”

Dundee hope they won’t be told to take the high road early next year when it comes to the new stadium, by which time it will be nearly nine years since Tim Keyes, the club’s owner, bought the 29-acre plot in conjunction with Nelms.

The pair formed a new company, Dark Blue Property Holdings, to deliver the deal and construct the new stadium, leading to some concern from fans who fear Dundee being left with nothing if the project falls through. Nelms insists the United States-based Keyes is not deterred by the seemingly interminable delay.

“I can tell you he is frustrated about this, but he and I share the same frustration,” he says. “It is the process. Although it is a long and arduous process, we have to respect it. And we are committed regardless of the process.”

It’s now just over 12 months since Keyes and Nelms – again in the guise of Dark Blue Property Holdings - bought back Dens Park from local businessman and former Dundee United director John Bennett. Ownership has not changed their view – they are intent on moving out.

“She's an old lady,” says Nelms, in reference to Dens. “During Covid, I explored it a lot. There is a part of that building, it looks like Frankenstein's lair! The old electrical room is unbelievable. I don't know how we're going to do it, but I would love to recreate that as part of a museum piece to show (in the new stadium).

“[General manager] Jim Thomson that has been here a long time. He showed how you had to pull a lever, sparks and smells and everything else, and then wait 30 seconds before you pull the next lever. If something happened to the lights, you had to shut the whole thing down and wait for a half hour. You had to be an engineer to turn a light on back then."

Nelms talks “all the time” about Dens with Gordon Strachan, the club’s technical director who started his career with Dundee. It will be a bind to leave, he stresses, but that’s the plan – the only plan.

“It's time,” he says. “We're trying to put on an entertainment product in a, basically, 19th century building. It's really hard to do.”

It’s equally difficult to imagine Scottish football with a gaping hole on one side of its famous shared street. “If they (Dundee United) want to build a stadium next to us, that's fine,” Nelms smiles.