Wolves chief executive Jez Moxey revealed the club considered leaving Molineux before committing to a minimum £40m redevelopment programme.

Club officials have been planning how best to tackle increasing their ground capacity for more than a year and the prospect of relocating from what has been Wolves’ home for the last 121 years has been looked into.

But the board decided against the idea once they were satisfied the stadium could grow within its ‘footprint’ at Molineux – despite having to slash the capacity to 24,000 for a period.

Moxey said: “We’ve thought long and hard about whether we should relocate – is there space around here to build a new stadium?

“The answer to that is no after some extensive searching. So we were stuck with rebuilding.

“Then there was the question of whether we should rebuild in one go by relocating, but we were absolutely adamant that we wanted to stay at Molineux during the redevelopment phases, which will take several years and create a lot of disruption to our supporters.”

Moxey warned fans of plenty of disruption during the four-year redevelopment period, once construction starts demolishing the Stan Cullis Stand next summer.

He said: “During the construction, capacity will clearly go down.

“We’ve consulted with our fans’ parliament about these plans and gone into quite some detail about it.

“We’ve told them that they need to work with us, because we’re going to need to insure our season ticket holders displaced from the Stan Cullis Stand are well looked after.

“Our capacity is going to go down to about 24,000 during phase one, and will go down to about 21,000 during phase two before the capacity goes back up.

“But if we didn’t proceed immediately with phase two, the capacity would go up to about 31,500. Phase two will take us to about 36,000.

“So there are going to be a lot of challenges for us and our supporters and we’re going to need a lot of understanding as we proceed to give our supporters something they’re going to be proud of for another 25 to 30 years.”

But Moxey stressed the whole Wolves family needed to look at the bigger picture if they wanted to see the club prosper long term.

He said: “I think we have to bite the bullet and if we’re really serious about getting Wolverhampton Wanderers to the level we want, we have to grow and we have to get bigger.”

“This is a brave, bold and ambitious step to take.”