The biggest issue I have with North Queenslands new stadium is that its probably the best candidate for the worst future proof designed newly built stadium. Its has 2 major design issues that inhibit its future use and potential, its roof design and its current capacity size.
The stadium was built with an open end that could at some point in the future be built to increase its capacity. Yet Its roof design means any future extension will require large sections of the stadoums roof to be removed; increasing the time and cost of any rebuilt significantly the point where cost will potentially outway any benefit.
This could be solved with temporary seating for special events. But due to the design of the stadium, only a small number of temporary seating can be built without massive costs.
And with the stadiums capacity at 25,000, even with a multi million upgrade to the stadiums the max would only be able to increase around 4 or 5 thousand, Townsville will never get a fifa world cup game, csnt see them getting anything other than low ranked rugby WC group games and will never see a state of origin unless covid 30 hits us..
But at least u have a nice home ground. Same can't be said with the tigers.. The biggest problem with the tigers is that we haven't settled ourselves down into 1 or two locations. I couldn't understand their logic in tearing down concord and spending all that money downgrading it into the training ground. Why didn't they set up concord as a proper home ground. They could've torn down and rebuilt the western stand and included the performance centre and added some media facilities into it, then kept the eastern stand with minor upgrades. With the savings made tearing down the eastern stand it wouldn't have cost much more. More than likely it would've been cheaper. The tigers then could've played at concord and Campbelltown. With both stadiums close to trains and with parking.
Tvl has been stagnate population wise for 15 years due to various reasons, by the time it needs a major extension it will probably need a new stadium. Its capacity is fine, if it was too low, tomorrows game would be sold out already, IMO 25k was bang on.
If they did indeed wanted to do a 5k seat extension, i can see it being done easily enough without the need to do anything to the current roofline, i think they would just put a 2nd tier in the the northern end and leave it un-covered, much like the origin 2 years ago with the temp seating. The temp seating was not efficient so it only put the capacity up 3k but if it was a proper stand I can't see why it couldn't be 5k. The current design was done to let the breeze in and have city views, closing it in would be pretty shit for the early and september games so it would need to be considered.
You have to remember with the roof design, it has to be substantial and in a way to withstand cyclones. A simple roof design might be cheaper but the design they chose was not only for the aesthetics but it had JCU input for wind survival.
On soccer, after what went down with the NQ Fury and the FFA there is a pretty sour taste in a lot of peoples mouths, I don't think people actually care that there wouldn't be any FIFA WC games, or even Union if you look at the crowd last weekend for the Reds (didn't even crack 9k). League is king up there (bless my home regions cotton socks).