Drama and atmosphere should be the only metrics in Australia’s stadium wars

Most fans don’t ask for much when they go to an Australian sports stadium. A fair ticket price, a reasonable seat, accurate scoreboard, quality alcoholic beverage and a meat pie somewhere between corpse cold and Hades hot. The stadium itself – the architecture, access points, the jiggery-pokery on the big screens before and after – is pretty immaterial. We’re there for the show on that gleaming green field. Everything else is window-dressing.

A great stadium should be a family-friendly battleground showcasing grassroots tribalism, athletic excellence and the unifying human experience of watching games played to their limits. And most weekends, they are. That’s what makes it so unedifying to see greedy, grandstanding administrators and governments use our major stadiums as bargaining chips and indexes for content, sponsor satisfaction, consumer outlay and broadcasting deals.

There is a golden decade of major events coming to Australia: the 2023 Fifa Women’s Football World Cup, 2032 Olympics and Paralympics, 2027 men’s and 2030 women’s Rugby World Cups, not to mention all the finals, grand finals and other tournaments in between. It means millions of dollars in ticket sales, tourism dollars, hotel tariffs and entertainment up for grabs for the stadiums of the cities who host.

So begins the jibber-jabbering of premiers, ministers, administrators and stadium landlords. And unfortunately, like most private schoolboy fracas, it boils down to who’s got the biggest.

Melbourne has the largest stadium, the MCG, with seats for 100,024 – a whopping capacity that adds millions to any code’s coffers. Although it has a long record of hosting Olympics, AFL grand finals and other extravaganzas, its only disadvantage when it comes to