CHAIRMAN Jason McGill believes York City’s move to the LNER Community Stadium will make for a more sustainable future than residency at Bootham Crescent could.

Concerns have been raised that the club’s tenancy at Monks Cross puts them on a more tenuous footing than owning the asset of their former ground through the subsidiary Bootham Crescent Holdings.

For McGill, however, memories of John Batchelor’s disastrous tenure as chairman are still raw.

Batchelor, who died in 2010, presided over a period during which a 25-year lease on Bootham Crescent was ripped up, replaced by a one-year deal, and the club was almost driven to extinction.

With a long-term lease at Monks Cross, such circumstances are unlikely to repeat themselves, McGill believes.

An added benefit of the club’s tenancy at the stadium are added opportunities to generate income, which the characterful but aged Bootham Crescent could not afford, as well as a significantly reduced cost of upkeep. The costs of delays to the ground - through maintaining Bootham Crescent, and the lost potential income from the Community Stadium - are believed to be significant.

McGill said: “When you go back to 2003, we had one year to find a solution to the stadium.

"Now we’ve got a 99-year lease at a facility where nobody can kick us out.

“There is more security here than there is anywhere else.

“It will stop anyone else from asset-stripping the football club.

“The positive that’s come out of that is we’ve got this. It’s given us an opportunity to enhance the income that the football club has never had before.

“From my point of view, it can only be a positive we’re in here.”