Recently I was looking at Aviva Stadium in Dublin and it struck me that there were some similarities with the proposed new AFL stadium in Hobart.

It was built on the site of the former Lansdowne Road stadium, which was completely demolished for the project. The stadium is to be owned for 60 years by a joint venture between the Irish Rugby Football Association and the Football Association of Ireland, after which it will belong solely to the IRFU.

Construction began in 2007, and took 3 years. The cost of Euro $410M was made up of $191M in national government funding, with the remainder a 50-50 split between the two sporting bodies.

The stadium commitment however nearly bankrupted both sporting bodies. Apart from the capital borrowings, they also pay rental fees to cover stadium management costs.

The stadium has collected a number of awards since the stadium opened its doors in May 2010, receiving recognition for architectural design, build and for its commitment to sustainability.

The official stadium website describes the venue as a “world class international stadium – an outstanding venue for football, rugby, concerts and conferences, providing a top class experience for customers, players, coaches, media, commercial partners and staff. “

This sounds all very much like what we are being promised for Hobart. It’ll be top of the line, it’ll be a multi-purpose venue, it’ll change the course of Tasmanian history, etc.

Except that in the case of Hobart, the AFL’s miserly contribution of just $15M – minus penalties for late completion – will mean the only candidate for bankruptcy from the project is the State of Tasmania.

Another similarity is that Ireland is quite separate from the European mainland, and hence might find it harder to attract touring shows and events, in the same way that Tasmania is remote in the Australian context. Bear in mind however that Dublin has major air links to the US east coast, whereas Tasmania has but a single regular international route (to Auckland).

As of the 2022 census, greater Dublin – presumably the catchment for most events at the stadium – had about 2 million residents. With the stadium’s capacity 51,000, we can therefore see that the venue caters to 2.5% of its catchment. ‘National events’ might attract fans from right across Ireland, population 5.1 million, hence it caters to 1%.

We know from recent figures in the 2021 census that greater Hobart has a population of about 250,000, while Tasmania has about 560,000. Even if we project these a little to estimate population at time of stadium completion*, the proposed stadium capacity looks too large. The 23,000 capacity stadium will be about 9% of its catchment (greater Hobart), and 4% of its wider area (all of Tasmania).

This concords with recent experiences at both Bellerive Oval and York, neither of which have reached anything like their ‘boilerplate’ capacity for any kind of event be it AFL matches, Big Bash cricket, Test cricket or any other events. As we reported recently, of the 14 AFL games with the highest attendances at York Park, only one has been in the last 10 years. Hobart Hurricanes crowds average about 11,000, and appear to be in decline.

We actually have some data on attendances at Aviva, straight from the stadium’s own website.

In 2022, the venue hosted 940,336 patrons.

Let that sink in. A venue that is far less likely to be under capacity than the Hobart stadium, because it services proportionally larger catchments, and is closer to major acts and events, had an attendance multiple of less than 20 times capacity in a whole year.

We can extrapolate this to the proposed Hobart stadium. 20 times capacity in attendances per year would equate to about 460,000 attendances per year. Remember there will only be 7 AFL games a year there, unlikely all to be sell-outs due to quality of opposition, team form, weather, competing events, economic conditions and so on.

That’s 7 men’s AFL games. Possibly there might be some AFLW, but the tendency of the AFL has been to play these games at ‘community venues’; in the Tasmanian context that’s likely to be Kingston or KGV, or even Dial Park (Penguin) or Devonport Oval once the revamp has been completed.

To this point no data has been released about projections of fans travelling across Tasmania for games. Will Hobart fans go to Launceston, and vice-versa? How many games will north-west fans attend, and where? Were these numbers actually done? What assumptions were used?

Let’s face it, every die-hard footy fan here already has an AFL team. So with a Tasmanian team, many will jump on board, but still retain some of their old loyalty. You could make a case that instead of doing a Hobart round trip to watch the Tasmanian team play mediocre opposition, a Launceston fan for example might save up and have a trip interstate to watch a better or more prestigious team, perhaps the one they’ve always supported.

I’m going to suggest that Hobart’s 7 AFL games will average 20,000 spectators. Even this is probably optimistic given the teams that will be programmed to play here, indeed it’s three times the crowd that turned up to the recent interstate game that was promoted as a ‘show of force’ by the pro-stadium mob. So that’s 140,000 spectator visits for AFL. With 3 Hurricanes games at 10,000 each, that’s another 30,000. So we have 170,000 stadium visits from the only two feature sports likely to play there.

That leaves 290,000 to come from other events. What events? 15 mega concerts of 20,000 each? Tasmania simply has no history of mass attendance artistic events with crowds that large. The camp-in Falls Festival was probably our biggest … at least until the organisers pulled the plug due to dwindling attendances, and always losing money.

Concert promoter Charles Touber wrote about the likelihood of large concert crowds recently. His opinion is quite sobering.

“Big-time acts play a strictly small number of shows in Australia,” he sated. “They can’t afford the time or lack of financial reward of playing a location with historically low attendances (in comparison with mainland capitals). It must be noted that AC/DC, the one show which attracted 15,000 people (ie, the one music event with a crowd of 15,000 or more this century), actually ran at a loss – hardly an incentive for the very few premium acts in the world who would have a chance at drawing that large a crowd in Tasmania. Other impediments to attracting these acts are our location and geography.”

The 460,000 attendances per year estimate already looks generous. Even so, it barely equates to 8,800 attendances on average per week. To put that into context, the central Hobart statistical area (as per the census) has about 50,000 workers, only a third of whom live in it. That means about 33,000 people enter Hobart each day. Or, weekly, let’s estimate that about a 180,000 being five working days and a lower rate of attendance on weekends. That’s still more than 20 times what the ‘pulling power’ of the stadium will be.

By the way, have you ever been to the MCG on a weekday? The Gabba? Adelaide Oval? There’s no-one there. A stadium is not going to ‘activate’ downtown Hobart, apart from a couple of handfuls of weekends and evenings a year.

The idea that the stadium is going to be a ‘game changer’ for Hobart is laughable. Every major Australian city has a stadium so it’s not a unique selling point.

It’s going to be just another football barn. Too big for what is required, too expensive for what we can afford. With a roof, meaning lousy acoustics for any kind of musical or theatrical events who, after the first few disasters and word getting around will avoid it like the plague.

The ugly truth the pro-stadium wafflefest won’t admit is that Hobart packs a double whammy of being small in size and expensive to get to, meaning it simply won’t be viable for ‘stadium scale’ events other than once in a blue moon. Nor will sport fill the void of the empty coliseum your great-grandchildren will still be paying for.

If only Hobart didn’t have an already-built AFL standard stadium with 20,000 capacity just 3km from the city centre we might have to build one.

But we do, so we don’t.

Featured image above: The view from Block 312 in the Aviva Stadium (Lansdowne Road), courtesy @wynnert. Republished under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Alan Whykes is Chief Editor of Tasmanian Times and likes his elephants the usual grey colour, not white, oh no siree!

ALAN WHYKES: A New Hobart Stadium? – Lost for Words.