Ebbsfleet chief executive Damian Irvine believes the club need to immerse themselves in the community to feel the true benefits of a proposed new stadium.

The club announced plans last week for a new 8,000-seater capacity stadium as part of a development, known as Northfleet Harbourside, which will cover 50 acres close to the harbour and river, and include shops and homes as well as office space and a hotel.

Clubs around Kent have benefited from ground moves in recent years, including Dartford and Maidstone, but Irvine feels the Fleet need to open their doors on a daily basis and become a focal part of the community.

“It’s not just you’ve got a lovely new stadium and you get better players and the performances change,” reflected Irvine.

“It’s more when you’ve got the right facility with the right conference and events centres, the right revenue-raising facilities around it and the right community integration so a club can really integrate.

“What happens is you get a much more engaged supporter base from people who are not pure football fans. Our core support is wonderful but we need people to help that core by being here and increasing the crowds.

“You need to have a stadium that Monday to Friday is busy and active, that people who aren’t necessarily football fans have an engagement with the stadium. They could be coming here for all sorts of different reasons, their charity meeting, shopping, whatever that is. That in itself is why clubs tend to have a bounce if it’s done right as the football club is more accessible and more attractive to a whole wider range of people.

“The bounce does happen but it becomes more because you are a living, breathing part of the community. It’s wonderful as it is but it’s just an old-fashioned football ground that once every two weeks people walk down to.”

Irvine has previous experience in English football at Notts County and Wycombe while he kick-started a multi-hundred-million-pound development at Cronulla Sharks in Sydney, Australia.

He’s made a big impression since joining Ebbsfleet in 2020 and revealed that a new stadium was never on the cards at that stage.

“I do take the plan very personally,” he said. “It’s funny that when I came here this wasn’t muted by any stretch, 100%. I knew and the owners knew there were plans for the hotel but I needed to come in and see what it was all about first, drill down and do the due diligence on what people needed and the area needed.

“What’s transpired in the last 12 months is that we’ve met some property partners, there’s been a lot of development in the area as we know and we feel we can really get this right as a wonderful legacy for the football club for the future.

“I’m certainly excited to do that but it’s a responsibility. I’m very cautious with our supporters because they’ve had promises in the past that haven’t transpired. That’s not foreign to me as when I went into Cronulla as chairman they went ‘oh, not another property plan’, they’d heard it so many times. But if you ask anyone at Cronulla now, they’ll say that we delivered that.

“That’s what we are here to try and do, it’s not going to be plain sailing by any stretch but the early indication from the people we’ve spoken to is, happily, really pleasing. All we want to do here is please supporters and the local community.”

It’s clearly an exciting - and busy - time for the Fleet. Their summer transfer activity has been impressive and they’ll be among the favourites to win promotion from National League South again this season.

The club will be keen to match progress off the pitch with on-field improvements under boss Dennis Kutrieb, who starts his third campaign at the helm.

“It’s busy but busy is okay,” said Irvine. “The process and long-termism we talked about on the football programme here, a big part of it was bringing Dennis in when we did in May 2020.

“That wasn’t a direct criticism of the previous manager or anyone involved but we didn’t have what I would call a measured masterplan in football behaviour, a culture of building and building, the like of which I’d known at Wycombe with Gareth Ainsworth.

“What we’re starting to achieve here with Dennis and the fruits of this close season have shown, we’re quite happy with our business and the squad we have changed and improved on while keeping a lot of continuity.

“I’m very happy with the football programme, that growth bit by bit which is what we are here to do. There’s no guarantees in any window that you’ve got it all right, but I’m certain that we’re more right than we were last year and we’re much more right than we were in year one.”