Cronulla would be the one who could most likely self fund their stadium after they sold the land around their ground for a healthy sum, but chose not to upgrade their ground for some reason. Penrith and the AFL's Collingwood and West Coast would be the other possible candidates who could self fund a stadium. Even the American Sports teams and to an extent, the EPL clubs get taxpayer funded stadiums/upgrades. Some new stadiums have even forced cities in the States to cut funding to essential services like hospitals because of controversial funding deals to try to prevent teams relocating
You do realise that even in the USA, many sporting facilities (e.g. NFL stadiums) are, at worst, co-funded by local or state authorities right? For example, Levi Stadium (home of thge San Francisco 49ers) was built with $850 million from the Santa Clara City Council, with only $200 million contributed to construictipon by the 49ers themselves (and that was obtained via a loan from the NFL itself). Few of them are solely funded by the home sporting tenant in the US.
You gotta love this place some times...
I didn't say anything about building a billion dollar state of the art stadium or anything of the sort, and I guarantee that every team in the EPL, NFL, most other major American sports teams, or their owners, could afford to build a "
modest roughly 20k seater" if they wanted to.
Sure, I was being hyperbolic before and every infrastructure project of such scale needs government support at least on some level, but it'd certainly be within the power of the Raiders Group to plan and build their own modest boutique stadium with the help of a developer, and yes some government support.
Such a stadium wouldn't be anything comparable to CommBank, the SFS, or AAMI, let alone the likes of anything in the NFL or EPL. Think something more akin to a modern version of the suburban grounds in Sydney, except built to be more comfortable for spectators in Canberra's climate. Maybe a stadium similar to the sort that some Championship or League One EFL sides use is a better example.
At this point Bruce is unsuitable for most games and so out of date and poorly designed that it's hurting the businesses of every team in the city. Any stadium deigned to take Canberra's climate into account would massively benefit the business of all sides in Canberra, even if that stadium only has a 16-20k capacity and few modern conveniences.
You could use the boutique ground for most games, and rent it out to the other teams in city, but continue to use Bruce for the bigger games where necessary. Then once the government actually builds the new stadium, which is looking likely to be about 20 years away at the earliest (unless something unpredictable happens), you could either knock down the little boutique stadium and develop the land, or turn it into a COE and knock down the current COE and turn it into residential. Either way everyone benefits in the long run.
Current global economic situation aside, it's doable and should have been at least explored as a opportunity by now, and the only reason it hasn't been is because of a sense of entitlement, unwillingness to compromise, and allowing the perfect to become the enemy of the good.
