The New South Wales government, in concert with the powerful SCG Trust, has adopted an “If we build it, they will come” approach to stadium policy, and come up with the curious plan to tear down two existing stadiums and build new ones upon sites that Sydney-siders currently do not relish attending. And it does rather beg the question: why?

Will more people attend sports fixtures in Sydney than they currently do if the stadiums are state-of-the-art? Will the quality of contests – the entertainment – that a flash new stadium will apparently draw to Sydney bring in the people to support it?

NSW criticised for plan to spend $2bn on replacing two Sydney sports stadiums Read more

One man who’s spent four long years trying to find out why Sydney folks don’t attend sporting events in anything like the numbers Melbourne folks do, is Hunter Fujak, an academic at the University of Technology Sydney. In March he’ll be able to boast that he’s literally written the book on the subject. His PhD thesis is about “quantitative modelling of sport and media consumption”. Whatever that means, the good Dr Fujak will be in high demand from sports bodies wondering what it can all possibly mean.

What does it mean? Why don’t Sydney people attend sports as readily as Melburnians? Why in a city of five million people would there not be enough fans to fill a 40,000-seat stadium every week? That the existing stadiums are dated? They’re 30- and 20-years-old. There’s more to it than that.

Why didn’t Destination NSW throw any money at the rugby league World Cup and secure more than two non-finals games? Why, outside of the Sydney derby game, are Sydney’s A-League attendances ordinary? Why can’t GWS Giants, who have a hot side, get more than a piddling 14,865 to a finals match, the lowest attendance in a VFL/AFL final since war-torn 1916? The Waratahs’ and Super Rugby’s brands are on the nose, and who knows what the Southern Kings are. But 10,555 on a Friday night in April? What’s doing, Sydney town?

In Sydney we just fundamentally do not have the culture of attending games.

Fujak says he doesn’t have the answer. Rather, he has hundreds.

“There’s a multitude of facets,” he says. “One of the interesting things in the argument is that, especially from a media perspective, we’ve kind of conflated ‘Sydney and Melbourne’ and ‘NRL and AFL’. There is a distinction.”

Fujak points to the Sydney Swans, who average 33,000 attendance. Sydney FC will get 18,000, the Wanderers 17,000. Meanwhile Melbourne City only get about 10,000, Melbourne Victory get 21,000, Melbourne Storm 18,000.

“There’s arguments both ways as to whether it’s a city v city issue or code-specific,” says Fujak.

Mainly, it comes back to “culture”. And that stuff is old and entrenched in the DNA.

David Squires on ... rebuilding Sydney's stadiums Read more

Consider Australia, which started to become the thing we know today when Captain Arthur Phillip landed with all the convicts and stuck a flag in Botany Bay in 1788.

From there Sydney town grew outwards from the eastern coast – to the north, south and west. By 1908 rugby league’s clubs reflected where people lived: Easts, Norths, Souths, Wests. There was inner-city Balmain, Glebe and Newtown. There was the far-flung port of Newcastle. There followed clubs representing Canterbury, St George, Parramatta and Manly.

In 1957 Sydney’s population was two million. Average attendance at rugby league games was 11,000. There were 10 teams. The cumulative attendance during the season cracked a million people over 90 games.

Fast forward to 2017 and there were 101 rugby league games in Sydney with 1.4 million attendees. So while the population went up 150% to five million, match attendance rose 40%. And as the city grew into the sprawling, gleaming behemoth it is now, when the demographics changed, rugby league didn’t change to meet them.

Sydney stadiums warm up for pitch battle over $1.6bn prize Read more

The year 1984 was the first year that Europe wasn’t Australia’s predominant source of migration. Today there’s talk of an “Asian Century”. Thirty per cent of Australians were born overseas. Fujak’s data – and a cursory glance at the faces in the stands – supports the premise that the dominant sports still tie very much to traditional, Anglo-Saxon roots.

Other traditions and culture hold firm, too. Melbourne’s Australian rules clubs have historically not been as reliant on poker machine money as Sydney rugby league clubs. Yet when the AFL expanded and Melbourne clubs were struggling financially they survived by being pushed into a membership model of ownership. Fans bought into their club. They invested in it, financially as well as emotionally.

Meanwhile, Sydney clubs were complacent that the rivers of gold from their leagues clubs, and from the NRL’s grants via broadcast money, would continue. Fan attendance at matches, while welcome of course, was far from their biggest priority. And thus, trying to change fan culture to embrace a membership model, and glean higher attendances, is on a slow burn. Culture takes time to entrench. You can’t just flick a switch and say to fans, join us, we can be heroes. Sport is about emotion and tribalism.

Fujak further offers that Sydney media’s coverage of sporting attendances appears “excuse-driven”: Stadiums are no good; they are too far away and lack atmosphere; traffic’s horrendous; it costs too much. Yet on a mild, dry Saturday night at purpose-built Allianz stadium in September there were just 14,000 fans at Penrith versus Manly in a semi-final. You could get a ticket for $15.

'A lonely sea of blue seats': why ANZ stadium is nobody's home ground Read more

The night before in Melbourne 92,000 saw Richmond versus Geelong at the MCG. More than all four NRL games combined. As 15,000 watched two Sydney clubs in the middle of Sydney, the Sydney Swans hosted Essendon Bombers next door in the SCG and drew 47,000, a record. The largest NRL attendance that round (22,000) was in Melbourne, Storm v Parramatta.

Says Fujak: “If you walked up to a hundred people in Melbourne and a hundred people in Sydney and asked them, ‘On a scale of 1-to-10 how big a sport fan are you?’ the distribution of people ends up being very similar. Of that hundred, a similar amount of people will say they’re a 7-out-of-10 or a 9-out-of-10, whatever.

“Where the difference comes in is that if you live in Melbourne and say you you’re an 8 out of 10 sports fan, you’ll attend about 50% more games. In Melbourne there’s a 60% more chance that person is a member of their favorite club. In Sydney it’s about 40%.

“So even though Sydney-siders think of themselves as sports fans, when you separate the psychology from the behaviour, Sydney people are just not as interested in sport as people in Melbourne.”

First Sydney's stadiums, now Hordern Pavilion site slated for redevelopment Read more

Transport infrastructure? Melbourne has a fine tram network. “Modern” Sydney has many cars and did away with trams in 1958. Fujak reckons infrastructure “probably plays a role” but that Moore Park isn’t that much further from the city than, say, the MCG is from Melbourne’s CBD. Homebush is a 20-minute express train from Central station. “I think we fall back onto the excuse of infrastructure a lot more than it really deserves,” he says.

For Doc Fujak, it always, essentially, comes back to culture.

“In Sydney we just fundamentally do not have the culture of attending games. And that comes back to long-term, entrenched behaviour. If your parents went to games and you were brought up in that, you will probably end up going to games.

“But if you never did, if culturally it’s not in your lifestyle, then you won’t. And Sydney largely doesn’t have that culture.”

The NRL has tried 6pm kick-offs, which were largely panned. Friday at 6pm for families? Mum and dad working to pay off the terrible mortgage. Kids in childcare. Living in the suburbs and then travelling – in peak hour, no less, with all those cars – to a stadium more than an hour away? Forget it. Monday night football – which replaced a Saturday afternoon game because of television – died because people didn’t want to go. School night, all that.

And when crowds go down, they keep going down. It’s like a great restaurant, full of people. You walk past, you think it must be a good restaurant. An empty one you think, what sort of dud tucker do they sell in there? AFL supporters know there’ll be 90,000 at the MCG for Collingwood and Carlton. Sydney’s A-League derby will fill Allianz Stadium. Sydney versus Wellington Phoenix? Not so much. Manly versus North Queensland at Homebush? Not at all. Humans have a hive mind. We love a buzz.

Sydney stadiums: NSW government faces 'greyhound moment' Read more

“That’s probably the other element of culture,” reckons Fujak. “So aside from the long-term component of culture, there’s the short-term momentum element. And fortunately for the AFL they’re on the right side of that momentum. Because for an AFL game people know there is going to be a crowd so they come. Positivity is self-perpetuating.

“In the NRL because there is so much talk about bad crowds it becomes negatively self-perpetuating. A core challenge for the NRL is how do they turn around the negative momentum there is towards attending games? Because you will never see a media article talking about how great this crowd is going to be, how great the atmosphere is going to be.

“And if there is never any positive press around it, how do you get over that hurdle?”

How about by building a couple of whopping, flash new stadiums?

As Marge Simpson often says to Homer: Hmmmmm.