There's the site next to Dandenong station that the Team 11 bid selected, with council support. Then City could have established themselves as a club for south-east Melbourne.

yeah

why doesn't city group builda new stadium?

why doesn't the govt built another 10 new stadiums?

why can't all the players be paid $10m+++ salaries?

why do i have to pay taxes?

:laugh::laugh::laugh:

Last one, good question..

A truly brain dead response.  Well done.

Travel in time back to 2005. Where should Sydney have played? Leichhardt Oval? It would have sent a message that the A-League is small time. It has no corporate facilities and is difficult to get to for anyone not in the Inner West.* Instead they went to the SFS and got 30k to their first game. What about Brisbane? Ballymore? Same issues. Adelaide, Perth, Central Coast, Newcastle had literally nowhere else to play. NZ Knights were playing in a small-ish stadium in outer suburbia (North Harbour) and stunk the place out. Maybe if they had played at Eden Park things would have been different. Victory started out in a decrepit Olympic Park and were selling it out, so moved to Docklands in their second season and got 50k to a Big Blue.

It's great to imagine boutique 20k stadiums with great facilities and fantastic transport access, but sadly we have to live in the real world, and none of the A-League clubs were in a position to build their own stadiums, so they had to make do with what was already there, as inadequate as it was.

* There was some talk of playing at Parramatta but it's a good thing they didn't, as otherwise there would be no Western Sydney Wanderers and no Sydney derby.

There's nothing wrong with the stadiums chosen to begin with especially considering no one knew exactly which way football would go without a ball being kicked and 6 new teams of the total 8.

However this doesn't mean there shouldn't have been long term plans in place to eventually move into your own football specific stadium. 

Like many people have pointed out, it is easily doable and affordable if you're going to build a stadium with 10k capacity, which would be great for the clubs individually, and the league as a whole. 

By then one of the criteria for expansion clubs would be that you needed to build your own 10k minimum capacity stadium to enter into the league. 

Playing out of big stadiums to begin with wasn't the worst thing out, but continuing to do so was and is suicidal in the long term in my opinion. 

Someone better tell WU not to build their stadium too big then. I hope it's not too late for them to change plans?

15k isn't too big. 

Are you sure??? Haha haha 

Yeah, but the original poster was talking about playing in boutique stadiums from day 1. It's a nice dream but totally divorced from the real world. Even now, I agree with you for some clubs (Brisbane and Wellington most notably), but not others (Adelaide, Perth, Victory, Wanderers, Mariners).

You say it's "easily doable and affordable" but in fact it's astonishingly hard for a private entity to build a stadium, even a starter-kit one with 10k capacity. Finding a suitable site in the current real estate market, for one: either you build it in the middle of nowhere (like the Knights or Marconi did, and as WU are trying to do now), or you have to front up for prime real estate, beating off apartment developers who will be able to make way more profit from the land than a football stadium is capable of delivering. Once you've acquired a site, the investment needed to build the ground is in the 10s to 100s of millions of dollars, which is an unprecedentedly huge investment for a football club to make.

So should Sydney try to find land that is accessible for their fan base (good luck with that!) and build a 25k-seater stadium on that, or should they rent the state government's brand-new $700m stadium with light rail access to its doorstep (and which will have a 25k "club mode")?

This is also partly why people are so sceptical of WU. Some are saying their Tarneit ground is a real estate ploy, but even this doesn't make much sense (it would be more profitable to just build the housing without the stadium, after all: the planning permission is already there, and I doubt a stadium would make property in the area more valuable).

No it won't, that was the first thing the NSW Government ditched. Townsend talked some tough words about how it was the reason they agreed to recommit to a redeveloped but inevitably folded completely on the issue.

They canned the LED curtain, which was a bit of whacky tech anyway. But the layout of the stadium will still allow the club to limit capacity to the 25k in the lower tier (they couldn't do this in the old stadium due to the stadium members and corporate boxes in the upper tier). And there's no reason why they can't lay tarps out over those seats for a meagre outlay.

I agree with you that the 10k - 15k stadium isn't easy for each and every club. 

It's much harder for Sydney FC ( East Sydney ) to get a stadium compared with Western Sydney Wanderers ( West Sydney ) for obvious reasons. 

Every club will have it's own issues, however there is no excuse for no club in the league owning their own stadium. 

We have certain clubs who average between 5k and 7k fans all season for over the past 10 years now, and have a membership fan base of under 5k.

It is for those examples where I say it is doable, especially in the long term considering they're already blowing a minimum of $2 million a season on stadium hire. 

Haha look if I was them I'd honestly only go 10k considering they only have about 4k fans, however at 15k it is still better than the shit we have today where they play out of a 36k fucking oval in a completely different city to Melbourne. 

In the history of this country, how many football teams have built their own stadiums ?

Well, in fact in the lower tiers, there are plenty of clubs that own their own facilities, albeit with small capacities.
For the moment, these sorts of clubs can't progress from where they are, but wouldn't it be nice if they had a tiny bit of incentive to be able to progress?
Further to that, South Melbourne has a long term lease on a fantastic boutique stadium, a beautiful part of Melbourne, about 3 or 4 km out of the CBD.
But no, we followed the dream of a club building its own stadium out in the sticks.

Look, I take your points.  SFC actually got 25k that first game, I think.  I was living in Auckland when the Kingz were in the NSL, BTW, and used to go to North Harbour Stadium for their games.  Great stadium and right on the motorway so easily accessible.  The U17 WC in 1999 didn't have any problems pulling crowds there.  It wasn't a location issue.  Eden Park would have made no difference to the Knights.  They were road kill and nothing would have changed that.

Essentially it was a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation with stadiums.  Start small and have full or near full houses and get the buzz from that but in suburban grounds that, yes, risk a negative message,  or think big and drown in oceans of empty seats.   Lowy was gambling on the League growing into those stadiums, but the problem was that the competition was hopelessly undercapitalised.  To grow the game according to that vision would have taken serious expenditure on marketing and PR, significant marquees at most clubs and the financial heft to pressure a hostile media into playing ball to some degree.  

Lowy must have been aware of the fact that the model was crippled by lack of capital.  Interesting that he wasn't willing to swing Westfield in behind the A League.   I've never understood why he didn't.

There are plenty of clubs at a lower level, but even if they don't own it I mean clubs who have a home ground they share with no one else. 

Regardless of who the owner is as long as you get a deal to be the only or main tenant, you're winning. 

There are many NPL clubs who you'll be surprised to know that they actually don't own the stadium, however it looks as if they do considering they're the only clubs playing there which is still good enough, or at least way better than the current situation. 

Adelaide United in the A-league are a good example of this considering they don't have to ground share with clubs from other codes. 

Successful people don't throw good money after bad.
One of Lowy's greatest feats was that he was able to get private backers to sink their money into what is essentially a loss-making exercise.
Over the course of 15 years, those backers have lost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Why lose your own money when you can convince others to lose their money?

Including the federal govt to stump up 45 million for a doomed to fail WC bid.

That took no convincing.  Rudd was right into it.

I don't think that it is any surprise that Westfield's sponsorship was directed towards the women's game.

What.... 

I went there for the MV game against Wellington a few years ago and it was pretty much universal consensus that the location was fucking appalling. It took an hour on a bus from Auckland CBD to cross the harbour and get to this stadium miles away on the outskirts of the northern suburbs only to have to cross a several paddocks and a fucking westfield that contained the only pub for miles.

It felt pretty similar to Brookvale in Manly, extremely inconvenient for anyone who didn't live in that part of town.

So in effect, not one team owns their own ground. Makes if fairly hard to build if you don't own the land.

I always drove.  Was always quick and no issue but I never bussed.  The people I knew loved the stadium.  

Eye of the beholder, I guess.  As I said, the 99 U17 WC games pulled good crowds regardless of day.    

No doubt about it, though - we come back to that core issue:  affordable real estate for stadiums is going to be out of town unless it's a rebuild of something that's there already.

No that's not true I didn't say not one team. But again what I'm saying is if you want to make it happen you can just like each and every NPL club has made it happen by playing out of stadiums suitable to the sport itself, and each clubs fan base. 

Clubs like Sydney Olympic on the other hand have went down the path of many A-league clubs, constantly playing out of different stadiums, instead of finding one suitable stadium to make home. 

Both teams wearing white, the ref pulling a hammy. Good times.

Last year at Lakeside the 4th official pulled a hammy putting up the board for time added on after 1st half .... Had to be stretchered off.

Again Ethnic clubs trump the A-League. hahahahahahahahahahahahah