At the heart of the comedy of errors that has become known as the Sydney “stadium wars” lurks a deep and particular insecurity.

Sydney hosts 14 professional men’s football teams, which is a lot in anybody’s books. Its main football venues, however, are a problem: two vast, creaking stadiums nobody really likes. For most games – of rugby league, rugby union and soccer – the 83,500-seat Stadium Australia and 45,500-seat Sydney Football Stadium (SFS) don’t even fill up halfway.

In Melbourne, meanwhile, the crowds at the two inner-city grounds dwarf their Sydney equivalents. In Brisbane, Lang Park is easy to get to on public transport and is known for its cauldron-like atmosphere. Adelaide’s Oval, which was redeveloped in 2014, has won multiple awards. Even Perth has a stylish new 60,000-seat stadium, with luxury features like cupholders and craft beer on tap which Sydney sports fans can only dream about.

With everyone else getting a shiny new – or at least renovated – stadium, the New South Wales government decided Sydney needs one of its own. Better yet, it needs two.

Perth’s 60,000-capacity Optus Stadium. Photograph: Will Russell/AFL Media/Getty Images

There’s just one problem: voters don’t think spending their money on facilities for elite sports is a good idea. Nearly 60% of NSW voters were opposed to rebuilding both stadiums from scratch. The NSW opposition leader, Luke Foley, has been electioneering in a red bus labelled with the slogan “Schools and hospitals before stadiums”. It doesn’t help that Stadium Australia is just 19 years old, and was trumpeted as “the best stadium in the world” when it opened.

The latest plan, announced two weeks ago, is to reconstruct the SFS but only renovate Stadium Australia, at a cost of merely $1.5bn instead of $2bn. It’s the fourth stadium policy in three years.

“People are still pissed off because it doesn’t change the narrative,” says the columnist Peter FitzSimons, who has led the charge against the rebuilds. “Everybody who has been campaigning for homeless shelters or demountable classrooms or hospital beds can point to the government and say, ‘you bastards, how can you find $1.5bn to replace existing infrastructure?’”

This is how ...

The threats

Globally, sports clubs regularly squeeze cities into spending public money on stadiums using a mixture of blackmail and questionable economic promises.

American corporate sports franchises (Australian sporting clubs are not for profit) have successfully pushed for more than 50 new facilities in the US the since 1999. Teams move all the time if they don’t get what they want – the NFL’s San Diego Chargers and St Louis Rams are the latest to up sticks for swankier lodgings.

The NRL suggested it might relocate its final if Stadium Australia wasn’t rebuilt. Photograph: Mark Nolan/Getty Images

In Sydney, the National Rugby League (NRL) took a page out of the American playbook, suggesting it might relocate its grand final if Stadium Australia wasn’t rebuilt. The government jumped.

“Both the Sydney Football Stadium and Stadium Australia do not offer the spectator experience expected of a world-class venue,” says a spokeswoman for sports minister Stuart Ayres. “New South Wales is losing events to places like Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide who have invested in their stadia network.”

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But would the NRL have really followed through on its threat to leave? We will never know for sure because when the premier Gladys Berejiklian announced her latest stadiums policy, she also trumpeted a deal to keep the final in Sydney for 25 years.

Unlike the US, however, the Australian sporting landscape is split by region, and there are fewer cities to host events. Rugby league remains most popular in Queensland and NSW, while Aussie rules football dominates Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia.

The NRL could move its final to Brisbane (which hosts one NRL team to Sydney’s nine), but it won’t even do so while Stadium Australia is being renovated, suggesting it wasn’t a serious threat in the first place.

As for other sports organisations and event promoters, it’s hard to imagine them abandoning Australia’s biggest entertainment market, no matter how ratty the stadiums.

Perth’s Optus Stadium was officially opened in January 2018. Photograph: Will Russell/AFL Media/Getty Images

The promises

The government has argued that better stadiums will generate more revenue by retaining events, attracting new ones and creating jobs. The premier initially said that two new stadiums would bring in $1bn a year, paying back the cost of their construction in just two years.

That claim is notably absent from the latest business case summary, however, which notes: “The quantifiable economic benefits of a new stadium fall slightly short of the economic costs.”

The assessment is in line with a growing body of research suggesting publicly financed stadiums rarely stimulate the economy enough to recoup their construction costs.

Stadium Australia is trying to be too much of everything and ends up being nothing Les Street, stadium historian

In Sports, Jobs and Taxes: The Economic Impact of Sports Teams and Stadiums, Roger Noll and Andrew Zimbalist conclude that new publicly subsidised stadium-building projects in the US had only minor effects on economic activity – and sometimes these effects are negative. They point out that in the absence of state-of-the-art stadiums, punters will simply spend their money on other things.

“These claimed benefits often don’t stack up,” says Liam Lenten, a senior lecturer in economics at LaTrobe University, whose research focuses on sport. “I wouldn’t say they never do, but you always have to be sceptical about it. The people who are responsible for producing these estimates often have skin in the game.”

The prestige

Better stadiums will lead to bigger crowds, right? Ayres and NRL CEO Todd Greenberg certainly think so. Research indicates that fans value atmosphere, accessibility and “sense of place”. And nobody’s saying they get any of this at Stadium Australia and the SFS.

Stadium Australia was designed as an oval-shaped Olympic venue, with little thought for its current life as a football stadium. In 2003, movable seating was installed to cater to oval fields (cricket and Australian rules) and rectangular ones (the rugby codes and soccer). But from the fans’ point of view, this attempt to have a bob each way undermined both uses – the distance to the field can be huge, and the cavernous interior sucks away atmosphere.

Thousands of people visit Stadium Australia a year before the 2000 Olympics. Photograph: Brendan Esposito/AP

“It is a venue that compromises itself,” says Les Street, a football fan and stadium historian. “It just doesn’t work … It’s trying to be too much of everything and ends up being nothing.”

The proposed renovation of Stadium Australia will convert it into a rectangular venue and reduce the capacity by 13,000. This might make it much more fan friendly, but a 70,000-seat stadium is still an awfully big venue for the 15,000-or-so people who turn up to the average rugby league game.

“When you’re in there and it’s a small crowd it just feels like you’re watching a training match,” says radio host AH Cayley. “Part of being a fan is the atmosphere. It’s not just the game, it’s the hyped energy, singing your songs, cheering, sledging. It’s really hard to do that when you can hear crickets.”

The SFS, meanwhile, is in a strange spot for a modern stadium, far from the city’s western population centre and nearly half an hour’s uphill walk from the nearest train station. A new light rail line opening in 2020 will help with access, but rebuilding the stadium won’t – so why would more fans turn up?

For now, the authorities seem to be betting that people who hate spending money on new stadiums will love them once they’re built. That has seemed to be the case in Perth and Adelaide, which went through similar early spasms of disapproval. Whether Sydneysiders will prove as flexible remains to be seen – and given the cost, they can only hope they don’t end up at the same junction in another 19 years.

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