The Premier League aspirations of Wycombe Wanderers FC were explained to delegates at the latest BucksPropSocial, held at the club’s Adams Park stadium.

Ben Brown, senior commercial executive for the high-flying League One club, spoke to scores of property professionals at the February 26 meeting and said owner Mikheil Lomtadze has made the club a personal project with an emphasis on developing its academy.

Mr Lomtadze plans to create a Cat 4 academy and to subsequently develop that to a top grade Cat 1 academy within five or six years.

Ben told the meeting: “He wants to be able to produce a world-leading academy and what we are doing here at the football club is extremely ambitious.

“Maybe in terms of the media, we are a little bit under the radar, given that in the same league as us we have Birmingham whose owners are spending loads of money on players on the pitch, and Wrexham who are spending loads on the pitch.

“But the key for us is building that world leading academy and what we’re aiming to do is to get that infrastructure in place at the football club.”

He said the club has Premier League ambitions by building year on year, not to go up and come back down.

While the pipeline of talent is seen as the most sustainable way to raise the club’s status, ground development depends upon the co-operation of the council in helping build a new access road. The capacity is currently limited because there is only one road in.

However, if promotion is achieved this season, the club will have three years to replace its last remaining terracing, bringing pressure for redevelopment.

Ben said: “We are looking at developing and building an access road. There’s one access road in and out of the stadium which limits, legally, what our capacity can be within the stadium.

“So we are working quite closely with the council at the moment to be able to put in applications to be able to put in that road.

“As soon as that’s done, business will be able to see the benefits and, for us, we are then able to look at what can we do to redevelop this stadium and what can we do to help improve the matchday experiences of supporters.

“What we want to do is, as well as growing everything we’re doing off the pitch, we want to be able to grow that supporter base as well because it’s important to have that good match day experience for supporters, while also being able to support our local businesses and our neighbours.”

The meeting also heard of the potential need for more than 100,000 new houses in the county.

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