The main issue with the Hutt Recreation Ground is that it isn’t up to A-League quality. Someone on the Yellow Fever forum said that it would cost $500k just to upgrade the lighting to TV standards and, if they were to move there more permanently, the seating would need to be upgraded too. There’s no way the owners would make that investment unless they were assured that they had a license long-term, and I’m not even sure who has jurisdiction over that ground.
Wellington is about 1000 kms closer to Sydney than Perth, so surely it can’t be purely a distance issue.
Hutt Rec would definitely require some investment, but if given the right assurances it seems like their owners would be willing to stump up the cash. Remember this proposal? They were planning to fund half of it.
To my mind the only concern unique to the Phoenix is the AFC issue. Not great crowds describes half the league at the moment, every club outside Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane has a poor TV rights value and the travel issue also applies to Perth.
If they can work out a long term agreement with the AFC (and that seems possible, given how keen FIFA seem to be on Australian football helping prop up NZ and Oceania) I don’t think there’s any reason to kick them.
I’d say the bigger concern is that we have a league largely underwritten by its broadcast revenue, and ten percent of the clubs are based in a country that generates less than once percent of the domestic broadcast revenue.
All else held equal, if we give the Phoenix license to any Australian market, it would probably allow us to extract a few million dollars more out of the next Fox Sports deal year than we would otherwise get out of Sky NZ.
That might be enough to sustain the current level of funding where our next deal might otherwise have gone backwards, or (if things are going better) half-fund another round of expansion, or make a second division more viable, or further professionalise the W-League.
There’s so many things that football in this country could do with $3m/year that I would prefer over subsidising a professional side in NZ.
Transfer the players and Rudan to Canberra tomorrow,its more COSMOpolitan than Wellington.Double the population and it IS in Orstraaalia,just happens to be capital.
Its LUDICROUS that the capital of a foreign country has a team in our national league but our capital doesnt,someone ARSED it up!
Well, how long did it take to knock down and re-build Parramatta Stadium? It should be ready to go in a couple of months, right? Demolition was completed in February 2017. So that’s two years. It shouldn’t be outside the realms of possibility for the Western Melbourne stadium to be sorted out in a similar timeframe here. The only question now is whether they have the funds to do it.
True, they don’t have the knock down time etc do they?
All the articles seem to indicate that funds are ready to go and as soon as permits are signed off (sounds like ground transfer has already taken place?) that they’re ready to start.
I’m really optimistic about Western Melbourne. They surely won’t be as big as Victory but they are avtually going to have a point of difference and if their stadium is good and the public transport goes in it could be a cool away trip.
While I’m not quite sure what the situation with Wellington may lead to, this is interesting and may scupper a potential entrance from Canberra in 2020/21 in place of the Nux: