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.
