What we have is unacceptable; what we could have is surprisingly achievable, argues Brian Finn in the final part of his stadium trilogy.

This story first appeared on The Bounce, a Substack newsletter by Dylan Cleaver.

Back in 2020 I was sitting on the couch watching an early-season NFL game – my Chicago Bears were playing the Los Angeles Rams at the Rams’ brand new home field, SoFi Stadium. The coverage cut to a beautiful shot of the stadium’s exterior façade. My lovely wife, walking past, asked why they were showing a new airport on the screen.

“No, honey. That’s not an airport, it’s a football stadium. In fact, it’s the most expensive stadium ever built. And it’s magnificent!”

“Oh,” she said, “why can’t we have a stadium like that?”

And that is the billion dollar question. Actually, in the case of LA’s new stadium it’s more like the US$5.5 billion question, but you get the picture.

My other half isn’t alone in envying LA’s sparkly new venue. New Zealand Herald columnist Matt Heath was drooling and sweating (best you read his column) during a recent visit to the Rams and Chargers’ new stadium. As he noted: “Americans do live sports brilliantly. SoFi and Dodgers stadiums are wonders to behold.”

So, as Plato once famously never pondered: Why can’t we do good stadia?

Australia can. Singapore can. Hong Kong can. Canada can. Ireland can. The Brits can’t keep their Prime Ministers entertained long enough to deliver anything, but they managed to fund and build Wembley Stadium, an Olympic Stadium and the swanky new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in north London, as well as many other football and rugby ground upgrades.

Yes, money is an issue and I’ll get to that, but as I pontificated in a previous column, the bigger picture is that we are crap at infrastructure.

Heat and light 

We are particularly crap at stadium developments, as the recent funding angst over the Christchurch Stadium demonstrated.

For some reason that is more peculiar to New Zealand than anywhere else.

Stadium deliberations generate a lot of heat and emotion, often for no justifiable reason. In Auckland Council meetings in recent years, stadium debates over relatively small sums (preliminary development of a cricket oval at Western Springs; funding for an alternate speedway base at Colin Dale Park) have generated hours of angry, ill-informed debate, sometimes without a concrete decision, while billion-dollar decisions around other infrastructure projects have been approved with barely a murmur.

Where Aotearoa’s stadium projects have succeeded, they have benefited from that rare thing in our civic and political realms – vision and leadership. Dame Fran Wilde was instrumental in getting the Wellington Stadium built against significant opposition. Malcolm Farry in Dunedin drove headlong at getting a new, covered stadium funded, built and opened in time for RWC 2011.  You could argue that prime minister Helen Clark and her sports minister Trevor Mallard nearly pulled something amazing off with the proposed Stadium New Zealand on Auckland’s waterfront in time for the 2011 tournament – but the word “nearly” is doing all the heavy lifting there.

So, how do we get a decent stadium in Auckland? One that reflects our passion for sport. One that caters for the needs of our most frequent hirers. One that is located in the right* place?

Well, I have a plan.

Let’s fix Auckland (or at least its stadiums)

Before we try and finance and build a new venue we first need to work out how to sort out the complicated stadium management structures in Auckland.

There are three Council-owned venues – Mt Smart Stadium, North Harbour Stadium and Western Springs. Then there is one privately owned venue – Eden Park. Yes, that’s right – Eden Park is a private venue with private beneficiaries and that doesn’t change just because CEO Nick Sautner keeps describing it as a community venue.

Only a few weeks ago, the New Zealand Herald was gasping at the shock-horror story that the All Blacks might not play a test match at fortress Eden Park in 2023. The main reason is that many of our major stadia will be tied up next year hosting the Fifa Women’s World Cup (and observing some rather demanding Fifa hosting requirements).

However, it’s not such a shock when you consider that despite Eden Park’s superior size and capacity, sports bodies don’t like hiring the place as it’s a difficult and expensive venue to use and work with. While hirers get up to 1.2m from ground level to advertise their sponsors, Eden Park has sold every piece of wall and signage above that including the big screens (some of which were funded by Auckland Council). You could see how much advertising there is because all of it had to be covered up for the Rugby World Cup due to clean-venue requirements. Hint: There was a lot of stuff covered up!

As one hirer described it to me, it’s like playing a game in Times Square. Take a look at other venues across the Tasman and around the world and you will see that host teams and hirers are able to create their own immersive environment through access to LED parapet screens and signage. The Eden Park business model means they are selling all that real estate.

On top of that, Eden Park has clearly demonstrated it is less interested in sport and more interested in concerts these days. Even Auckland Cricket acknowledges as much in their latest annual report, which signals a move away from Eden Park to a “new home” from a range of possible alternatives.

There have been many efforts from successive councils, council officials, CCOs and others to develop a cohesive plan for improving Auckland’s stadia facilities. Among these plans were at least two attempts (and currently a third is underway led by Tātaki Auckland Unlimited) to bring Eden Park and Auckland Council’s venues under one stadium network.

The Eden Park Trust Board has typically gone along with the conversation until such time as the reality hits that Eden Park would lose its independence and its two enshrined beneficiaries – Auckland Rugby and Auckland Cricket – would have to jump off the gravy train that has supported them for decades.

At the same time, Auckland Council’s changing structures, Covid-hit budget and major capital commitments to the City Rail Link and water infrastructure, all mean they have little wiggle room to pump any new funding into stadia. This is while Eden Park continues to siphon much-needed revenue in the form of concerts from the ratepayer-owned Mt Smart and Western Springs.

Several times in the past 20 years, Auckland sports fans have been feinted out by the possible, potential, proposed prospect of a gleaming new footy stadium – sometimes on the waterfront; sometimes in or near the city; sometimes… some time? Each time, those hopes have been dashed against the rock known as “the status quo”.

The status quo sucks

You know the lingo. “Oh it sort of works”; “yeah it’s pretty crappy but we make do”; “if we just give it a lick of paint it should be good for another decade.”

But what if we could do better? What if we could be like Australia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Ireland or Canada or… anywhere really? What if we designed and built a proper national stadium for football codes in downtown Auckland? And then we could build a proper cricket oval somewhere and future-proof oval sporting codes.

To achieve that we’d need to break the status quo.

At the height of the debate over the Christchurch stadium funding earlier this year, a major stadium operator told me that one solution to the challenges of funding and then operating a new stadium in the city would be to put the new Christchurch facility and Dunedin’s Forsyth Barr Stadium under one operating structure.

Similar shared stadium arrangements have been successfully utilised in Western Australia, Queensland and New South Wales.

The shared management of Auckland’s Council-owned stadia since 2010 has already proved the value of such a model, saving tens of millions of dollars of ratepayer money and requiring less resource. Case study – Eden Park has the same staffing numbers for one venue as Auckland Council has for three.

So if Eden Park won’t willingly come to the table – what will change it? The experience in Australia is that the legacy codes must be incentivised to give up their ride on the gravy train. That means writing a cheque for Auckland Rugby and Auckland Cricket, wishing them well in their future endeavours and then handing the keys of Eden Park over to Auckland Stadiums or some replacement management structure to manage all of the city’s stadia.

Once that happens, there is the potential to plan for a long-term future for all of Auckland’s venues. Such a model would need to come under public ownership and management to be effective. It would be unthinkable to pull the legacy aspects of privately-owned Eden Park Trust’s current structure into a new stadium environment.

Why? For a start, they have no money. As recently as this year, they have gone cap in hand to Council for maintenance funding. Second, the idea of providing a revenue stream through publicly-funded facilities to private organisations (Eden Park Trust, Auckland Rugby and Auckland Cricket) is anathema to any notion of fairness and equity for other hirers. It immediately drives up the cost as NZ Rugby, NZ Cricket, the Blues and the Warriors are all too familiar with.

So assuming Auckland Council / Auckland Unlimited could bring the stadia under one umbrella, they could bring all the stakeholders together, identify the current and future facility needs and work towards a new footprint for Auckland’s venues.

In all likelihood, that would arrive at the need for a rectangular stadium (for codes such as rugby, rugby league, football and concerts) and an oval ground for cricket and, potentially other uses. Australia’s AFL, for example, continues to scout for a toehold in New Zealand, possibly via a WAFL franchise.

Such a blueprint must also give further consideration to the future needs, such as the growth in women’s sports and the impacts on athlete and fan facilities, esports, concerts and multi-sport and marquee events.

Could Auckland’s existing venues fit the bill? In my view the answer is no, no, no and maybe. Mt Smart Stadium is ageing and in need of significant maintenance and upkeep – and is in the wrong place. North Harbour doesn’t have the right configuration – and is in the wrong place. Eden Park has the wrong configuration, is the wrong size for all but a couple of events each year – and is in the wrong place. Western Springs, as was previously proposed, could make a terrific cricket ground as it is already a natural oval.

Some of the existing venues could be repurposed for more modest uses (training and community use), while others could be retired with the funds generated from re-using the land reinvested into sport and recreation.

That will take time, of course. In the meantime, we should maximise the lifespan of the venues we have while developing and then committing to a plan for renewal and, ideally, new venues.

Say you’ll build it… and they will come

Which brings us back to the starting point. How could Auckland afford to plan for, design and build a new stadium to take the place of the existing venues? And how is that even feasible when there is an inflation crisis, a lingering pandemic, international conflict and building and supply chain limitations?

Incredibly, it is possible if we move outside the bounds of public funding and control. Singapore’s National Stadium, and Perth’s Optus Stadium were both built under PPP (Public Private Partnerships) and third-party management services. Similarly, private equity or investment funds have put significant money into stadia in other places.

The reality is that stadia, like other public infrastructure, are good, long-term plays for global investment funds. They are permanent, they usually have a reliable income path and are underpinned by a partnership with central or local government that provides certainty.

You might think a small market like ours might struggle to attract such investment, but we have already seen private equity invest in the commercial assets of our largest sport; a private consortium bid for the construction of the new Christchurch stadium; and a PPP model underpinned the construction of Spark Arena, New Zealand’s busiest entertainment venue.

We’ve also had private consortia enter the market to develop everything from prisons to motorways.

Such mechanisms allow public entities to offset the upfront funding and much of the risk of development through a private sector third party. Yes, ratepayers would need to pick up some of the tab, but, importantly, not all of it. And it would remove some of the risk of escalating costs.

Consider the option of a central city stadium located on Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei and railway land behind Spark Arena, in a development supported by hotels, restaurants and bars, and with apartments and offices rounding out the offer.

That sounds like a development opportunity that major investors and developers would want to kick the tyres on. What would Peter Cooper (the man behind the transformative Britomart development) and his contemporaries be able to do with such an opportunity? And for fans, how good would it be to walk from a bar and restaurant a few hundred metres into the national stadium and take your seat for a concert, a Warriors or Blues game, or an All Blacks or Black Ferns match?

It would also transform the eastern edge of Auckland and make it attractive for local businesses and neighbours, and encourage complementary development, enhancing the value and prospects of land and buildings owned by Ngāti Whātua, Council and others**.

Sorting out Auckland’s venues would also allow sport and entertainment hirers to maximise the opportunities of the largest population base in the country and showcase New Zealand on the world stage – from both regular club (Super Rugby Pacific, NRL, A Leagues), international (All Blacks and Black Ferns, All Whites and Football Ferns) and global (Commonwealth Games, British & Irish Lions, World Cup) events.

It’s more achievable than many people – especially the burghers of Eden Park – would have you believe.

It just requires some vision, clear leadership and a plan for change.

* With the exception of Western Springs which has good motorway access – all of Auckland’s venues are badly located.