The Club is at a loss to understand what prompted Cllr McLellan to make such personal and mis-leading remarks about Aberdeen Football Club in relation to the community stadium project in Saturday’s P&J.

He knows full well that the site at Pittodrie is only a small part of what the Club offered to bring to this project. The co-leaders of the Council promised, at a meeting with the Club around 18 months ago, to have their executive team research in detail similar projects in the UK where a football club is the anchor tenant in a community stadium that fuels economic growth, in the knowledge that Aberdeen FC would be committed to providing a rent and rates income stream.

As the anchor tenant of a new multi-sports, community stadium, Aberdeen FC will pay hefty rent and rates, adding tens of millions in new revenues to Aberdeen City Council, over a long-term lease.

And, as if that wasn’t appealing enough to a cash-strapped local authority, a new economic impact report from BiGGAR Economics revealed that this transformational project will generate £3.2billion into the local economy over 50 years. It beggars’ belief that Councillors, who are supposed to have the interests of our city at heart, are not taking this seriously.

The Council can borrow money for capital projects at very favourable interest rates to create a transformational community asset which would deliver an attractive return on investment in terms of jobs, spend in the local economy and additional tax revenues.

Councillors also know that it was Aberdeen City Council who proposed a shared community stadium and leisure centre and who asked Aberdeen Football Club if they would consider staying in the city centre and being the major tenant for the centrepiece of the beach masterplan.

The beachfront regeneration presented the opportunity to build a world-class, net zero heated and powered, shared community stadium, including around 6,000 sq ft of social wellbeing and community space, and leisure facilities.

If this was just about a new stadium for the Club, we’d look at moving ahead with Kingsford or explore the major challenges of trying to redevelop Pittodrie. But it’s not. It’s about Aberdeen City benefiting from the catalytic impact of a new community asset at the beach.

It’s not about what the Club wants or needs, it’s about what’s best for our city and its citizens at this pivotal time for our future prosperity.

But we can only move forward when the ambition for such a transformational project is recognised and there is the political will to make it happen.

Yes, there has been significant investment at the beach, but spending £55 million on an urban park does not create jobs or generate wealth into the economy. Instead, they are a drain on Council resources, adding considerable, annual maintenance costs to an already-constrained operating budget.

The report from BiGGAR paints a compelling picture of the jobs this project would create and sustain and the overall economic uplift to the city as a whole. We recently hosted all of the council party leaders at Pittodrie to share the top-line findings from the report.  At that meeting the Club pleaded with everyone to put down their swords and work together to seriously evaluate the project. To that end, we left the meeting agreeing that we’d jointly work on a heads of terms agreement. This was to be led by the Council, not the Club.

But instead, all we’ve seen from them are mis-leading briefings to the media, dismissing the economic report, by a reputable company used by the Scottish Government, and disparaging what our supporters bring to this city, including the 130,000 who turned up for the open top bus parade after the Scottish Cup win.

This beachfront vision can still be pulled off and, with the demise of our oil and gas industry being accelerated by government policy, it’s even more urgent that Aberdeen shows ambition by committing to deliver projects which will make companies and people want to remain here.

The ball is not in our court, it is well and truly in the hands of our Council leaders – only they have the mandate and the ability to secure public, capital investment to drive a major infrastructure project like this.

The leaders of the opposition parties understand this. Sadly, our current administration does not and continues to deliberately miss the point which is both disappointing and disingenuous.