Sydney stadium debate more to do with politics than sport as NSW election approaches
By Offsiders columnist
Richard Hinds
Posted about 3 hours ago Fri 8 Mar 2019, 5:58am
This says something about the vexed relationship between the powerful financial, political and media coteries who rule Sydney sport and those who love it. You can decide just what.
The NSW Government is set to tear down the still functional but outdated Sydney Football Stadium and — if re-elected on March 23 — replace it with a shiny new $730 million venue.
Thus, notionally, spectators would watch NRL, Super Rugby and A-League matches in the kind of comfort taken for granted by ticketholders in other major Australian cities.
Yet rather than basking in pre-electoral glory, the decision to build the new stadium is considered so unpopular by political analysts that Premier Gladys Berejiklian might as well put a nuclear power plant next to a kindergarten.
How, those in Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide or Perth will ask from their comfy grandstand seats has building a new stadium near the centre of a city with more professional football teams than any in the world become the unpopular option?
Partly it is because the Sydney stadium debate is less about actual stadiums — and the poor ticket-buying slobs who would occupy them — than it about the city's most popular spectator sport, blood politics.
This was never more obvious than during the on-air exchange between radio host, SCG Trust member and multi-sport heavyweight Alan Jones and state Opposition Leader Michael Daley, during which
Mr Daley promised to sack Jones and other SCG Trust members if elected.
You could have filled a new stadium for this compelling piece of political theatre with Mr Daley taking the role of people's champion against the big-end-of-town toffs, who were building another palace at taxpayer's expense next door to their lavishly renovated SCG.
Jones — unsurprisingly — returned serve the next day by sooling two NSW Government ministers on to Mr Daley, who was cast as a "liar" for his assertions that the Sydney Football Stadium was being demolished by stealth.
Thus, as often seems the case with Sydney sports administration, the stadium debate seemed to have less to do with the stadiums themselves, and those who would actually pay to get in, than it did about ego, politics and power.
Lost somewhere amid the chest-beating and political point scoring was the essential question — does Sydney need new stadiums and can it afford them?
In this regard, the greatest furphy is that Sydney Football Stadium is "just fine" and "only needs a lick of paint". Anyone who has experienced the comfort of stadiums elsewhere would be willing to personally swing the wrecking ball in Moore Park.
As for the cost of Sydney's sporting rebuild — a total $1.8 billion when you add the new $300 million Western Sydney Stadium (formerly Parramatta Stadium) and the promised $800 million renovation of Sydney's Olympic stadium?
To some this expenditure is a mere 2 per cent of the state's infrastructure budget. To others it is a whopping 2 per cent of the state's infrastructure budget.
Either way, the "whataboutism" of the ALP's "schools and hospitals over stadiums" slogan is wilfully disingenuous in asserting you can only have one thing or the other.
Redevelopment opponents can point to poor crowds
Which brings us to the genuine justification for not building top quality sports stadiums in Sydney — a lack of compelling demand.
As a long-term proponent of improving Sydney's sports stadiums, I had one supposition: local competitions and clubs would significantly upgrade membership models, increase crowds and mount an irresistible case for better venues.
This case would not be predicated on occasional "major events" and their one-off economic sugar hit, but on the week-to-week demand of fans as is the case in other Australian cities.
As galling as it would be to cricket lovers, the MCG might rightly be renamed the Melbourne Footy Stadium given the AFL's enormous weekly crowds fund the regular facelifts enjoyed by the crowds at the Boxing Day Test.
Yet rather than marshalling their numbers over the past 15 years, crowds for NRL matches, the Waratahs and the A-League have mostly flat-lined or dropped.
Blame maladministration — the NRL's perennial crisis mode, Rugby Australia's lack of growth and imagination, Football Federation Australia's botched World Cup bid that sapped the life from the A-League.
Blame the clubs — failure to actively engage and consolidate membership bases.
Blame the current substandard stadiums — the argument used by the stadium advocates who insists that "if we build it they will come".
On this final point, the first NRL fixture at the new Western Sydney Stadium on Easter Monday (April 22) might have proven a game changer in the Sydney stadium debate.
The original Parramatta Stadium, opened in 1986, was considered by many of those now opposed to the Sydney Football Stadium demolition to be "fine" and "just needing a lick of paint".
But if the new stadium provides the comfortable, intimate and engaging "fan experience" that has been promised, it might convince some doubters that a first-class venue can be almost as vital in attracting crowds as what takes place inside.
Of course, the Western Sydney Stadium will not open until after the state election.
By then the Sydney Football Stadium will probably be rubble, the newly installed NSW Government will either replace it or, if the ALP prevails, demand the newly established SCG Trust takes out a loan to do so.
Regardless, necessary goodwill for the project from fans will have been lost amid the self-interested infighting between Sydney's financial, political and media classes.
Meanwhile fans elsewhere will shrug and wonder: Why can't Sydney have nice sports things?
