Australian Football's Rectangular Stadium Problem
Australia builds oval stadiums for Australian rules and rectangular ones for rugby league. Football gets neither, and every A-League club rents.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Venues18 min read
- A-League clubs owning their ground
- None, all twelve are tenants
- Grounds shared with another professional tenant
- Ten of the eleven venues used in 2026-27
- Largest capacity mismatch
- Suncorp Stadium seats 52,500 against a league average crowd of 8,879
- Allianz Stadium rebuild
- About 828 million dollars, reopened 2022, shared with two other codes
- CommBank Stadium
- 360 million dollars, opened 2019, shared with two NRL clubs
- Coopers Stadium upgrade
- 53 million dollars completed 2024, with no increase in capacity
- Brisbane 2032 main stadium
- About 3.785 billion dollars for 63,000 seats, built as an oval
- Perry Park proposal
- Up to 200 million dollars for a 17,000 to 20,000 rectangular ground, not in the official 2032 plan
Australia has built some of the best sporting stadiums in the world and almost none of them were built for football. That single sentence contains most of what there is to say about where A-League clubs play, why several of them look wrong on television, and why the sport with the largest participation base in the country cannot point to a building it owns.
The mechanics are geometric before they are political. Australian rules football and cricket are played on large ovals. Rugby league, rugby union and football are played on rectangles. Australia's public stadium programme over the past forty years has produced world-class ovals for the first group and very good rectangular grounds for the second, and in every case the rectangular grounds were justified, designed, scheduled and named around rugby league. Football arrived afterwards, as a tenant, in somebody else's building.
This page sets out where the twelve A-League clubs actually play, who else uses those grounds, why the capacities are wrong in both directions, and what the argument for change looks like. The sixteen individual venue guides on this site cover the buildings themselves; this is about the structural position football occupies within them.
What rectangular actually means here
A football pitch is roughly 105 by 68 metres. A rugby league field is 100 metres between the goal lines plus in-goal areas, about 68 metres wide. The two fit inside the same rectangle with minor adjustments, which is why they share grounds easily.
An Australian rules ground is an oval between about 135 and 185 metres long and 110 to 155 metres wide. A cricket field is a similar shape. Putting a football pitch inside one leaves a ring of unused turf between the touchline and the first row of seats, sometimes thirty metres of it. The crowd is pushed back, noise dissipates upwards instead of onto the field, and the camera angles flatten. It is playable and it is a bad experience, which is why the early A-League's habit of using oversized oval grounds was corrected deliberately over the following decade.
That correction is the reason almost every A-League club now plays in a rectangular ground of 17,000 to 30,000 seats. It also explains why the competition has nowhere left to go: it has already moved into every suitable rectangular building in the country, and there are only about eleven of them.
The oval inheritance
Australia's stadium stock reflects the sports that had money and political weight when the buildings went up.
The Melbourne Cricket Ground, the Sydney Cricket Ground, Adelaide Oval, the Gabba and Optus Stadium are ovals serving cricket and Australian rules. Marvel Stadium is an oval serving Australian rules. These are excellent venues and they are not available to football in any meaningful sense.
The rectangular stock is much shallower and almost all of it is rugby league infrastructure. Suncorp Stadium is Lang Park, a league ground since 1914. Accor Stadium is the converted Olympic stadium. Allianz Stadium is the rebuilt Sydney Football Stadium, whose name refers to rugby rather than to soccer. CommBank Stadium in Parramatta was built for the Eels. McDonald Jones Stadium in Newcastle is the Knights' ground. AAMI Park in Melbourne is the one significant exception, a purpose-built rectangular venue designed from the start for multiple codes including football.
Football did not lose a competition for stadium funding. In most cases it was not in the room when the building was justified.
Where the twelve clubs play
Eleven grounds serve twelve clubs, because the two Melbourne clubs share.
| Ground | City | Capacity | Built for | Other professional tenants |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coopers Stadium (Hindmarsh) | Adelaide | 16,500 | Football | None regular |
| Campbelltown Sports Stadium | Campbelltown | 17,500 | Multi-code | NRL fixtures |
| Polytec Stadium | Gosford | 20,059 | Multi-code | Occasional NRL |
| HBF Park (Perth Oval) | Perth | 20,500 | Australian rules, converted | Western Force, rugby union |
| Go Media Stadium (Mount Smart) | Auckland | About 25,000 | Speedway and league | New Zealand Warriors, NRL |
| AAMI Park | Melbourne | 30,050 | Rectangular multi-code | Melbourne Storm, NRL |
| CommBank Stadium | Parramatta | 30,000 | Rugby league | Parramatta Eels, Wests Tigers |
| McDonald Jones Stadium | Newcastle | 30,000 | Rugby league | Newcastle Knights, NRL |
| Hnry Stadium | Wellington | 34,500 | Multi-code | Hurricanes, cricket |
| Allianz Stadium | Sydney | 42,500 | Rugby | Sydney Roosters, NSW Waratahs |
| Suncorp Stadium | Brisbane | 52,500 | Rugby league | Brisbane Broncos, Queensland Reds |
Read down the "built for" column and the position is obvious. One ground in the competition was built primarily for football. One was designed as a genuine multi-code rectangular venue. The rest are rugby grounds, converted ovals, or council multi-purpose facilities that football uses because nothing better exists in that city.
- 12A-League clubs
- 11Grounds used
- 0Clubs owning their ground
- 10Grounds shared with another pro tenant
- 1Grounds built primarily for football
Counts the eleven venues used by the twelve A-League Men clubs for the 2026-27 season. A shared ground is one with at least one other professional tenant in another competition. Capacity figures are venue operator listings and vary slightly by source.
Nobody owns anything
Every ground in that table is owned by a state government agency, a local council or a trust. Venues NSW holds Allianz Stadium, CommBank Stadium and McDonald Jones Stadium. The Victorian government holds AAMI Park through the Melbourne and Olympic Parks Trust. The Queensland government holds Suncorp. VenuesWest holds HBF Park. The South Australian government holds Coopers Stadium. Campbelltown and Gosford are council grounds. Auckland Council and a Wellington trust hold the two New Zealand venues.
Public ownership of major stadiums is the Australian norm and applies to AFL and NRL clubs too, so this is not discrimination. What it does mean, for a competition with a hard salary cap of A$3 million and a history of club failures, is that no A-League club has ever built an asset. A club that folds leaves behind a licence and a merchandise stock.
It also means the club does not control the things that determine the matchday experience. Pitch preparation, catering and bar income, naming rights, signage, seating configuration, security arrangements and the allocation of dates all sit with the venue operator. A club unhappy with its surface cannot fix it. A club that wants a 5pm Sunday kick-off gets the slot the operator and the broadcaster agree on.
Ground-sharing and what it does to a pitch
Ten of the eleven grounds carry at least one other professional tenant. AAMI Park is the extreme case: Melbourne Victory, Melbourne City and Melbourne Storm all play home fixtures on the same pitch, and until recently a Super Rugby side did as well.
A rectangular pitch carrying three professional tenants across overlapping seasons is being played on far more often than a pitch carrying one. Rugby league and rugby union do a particular kind of damage through scrums, rucks and tackle contact concentrated in the middle third. Football is less abrasive but demands a truer, faster surface than either. The groundstaff at these venues are very good and the arithmetic is still against them, particularly in the shoulder months when the A-League season and the winter codes overlap.
The scheduling consequence is at least as important. When two competitions want the same weekend, the venue operator resolves it, and the operator's revenue is dominated by whichever tenant draws 25,000 people rather than 9,000. That is why A-League fixtures move, why some clubs play midweek more than they would choose, and why kick-off times land in slots that suit a broadcast grid rather than a family travelling from the suburbs.
The capacity mismatch runs both ways
The A-League averaged 8,879 per match in 2025-26. Against that, five of its eleven grounds seat 30,000 or more and one seats 52,500.
Brisbane is the clearest case. Suncorp Stadium is a magnificent rectangular ground, one of the best in world rugby league, and a Roar crowd of eight or nine thousand inside it reads as an evacuation on television. The lower bowl alone holds several times the typical attendance. There is no smaller rectangular alternative in the city with the facilities a professional competition requires, so the club plays in a stadium built for a different audience and absorbs the visual cost every week.
- Suncorp Stadium capacity52500
- A-League Men average crowd 2025-268879
Suncorp Stadium's listed capacity compared with the A-League Men average attendance across 163 matches in the completed 2025-26 season. Brisbane Roar's own average is higher than the league figure in some seasons and lower in others; the comparison illustrates the venue mismatch rather than the club's specific attendance.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Suncorp Stadium capacity | 52500 |
| A-League Men average crowd 2025-26 | 8879 |
At the other end, Coopers Stadium at 16,500 and Campbelltown at 17,500 are the right shape and size for a normal fixture and cannot take a genuinely large one. Adelaide United's ground is hemmed in by roads and heritage buildings, which is why the 53 million dollar upgrade completed in 2024 improved roofing, lighting, changerooms, screens and hospitality without adding capacity. When a club has a fixture that would draw 25,000, it has nowhere in the city to put it except an oval.
Both problems are the same problem. Nobody has built a 20,000 to 25,000-seat rectangular stadium for football, because governments do not build stadiums for third tenants.
Melbourne: the best building, shared three ways
AAMI Park opened in 2010 and is the template for what Australian football actually needs: 30,050 seats, steep rakes, a bioframe roof over most of the bowl, the crowd close to the touchline, and a location inside the Melbourne and Olympic Parks precinct with direct public transport.
It is also the busiest rectangular pitch in Australia, hosting two A-League clubs and an NRL club, and it is not football's building. The two Melbourne clubs share not just a stadium but a dressing-room complex, a pitch and a brand environment. Melbourne Victory and Melbourne City cannot make their home ground feel different from each other, which is a genuine problem for two clubs contesting the competition's biggest derby.
The stadium's original design was reported to allow for additional seating in a later stage, which would take it towards 50,000. There is no funded programme to do it, and if there were, the case would be made on the basis of all three tenants rather than football alone.
Sydney: three grounds, three landlords, no home
Sydney FC play at Allianz Stadium, rebuilt for about 828 million dollars and reopened in 2022, alongside the Sydney Roosters and the NSW Waratahs. Western Sydney Wanderers play at CommBank Stadium in Parramatta, built for 360 million dollars and opened in 2019, alongside Parramatta Eels and part-time Wests Tigers fixtures. Macarthur FC play at Campbelltown Sports Stadium, a council ground.
Sydney therefore has three modern or refurbished rectangular grounds and football is the junior tenant in all three. CommBank Stadium in particular is close to ideal for the Wanderers: 30,000 seats, a steep bowl, strong atmosphere, in the heart of the club's catchment. It was built and justified for rugby league, and the Wanderers negotiated their way in.
The competition record crowd of 61,880 for a Sydney derby in October 2016 was set at the Olympic stadium, a venue nobody would choose for a normal fixture and which flatters nothing below about 30,000. It has not been approached since and was a product of a one-off move to a much larger ground.
Adelaide: the closest thing to a home
Coopers Stadium, still called Hindmarsh by most people who go there, is the one venue in the competition whose calendar is built around football. It has been a football ground since the 1960s, hosted matches at the 2000 Olympics and the 2023 World Cup, and received a 53 million dollar redevelopment completed in 2024 covering an eastern stand roof, corporate and media facilities, changerooms, lifts, food and beverage outlets, four new light towers, replay screens and pitch surround screens.
It is government-owned, marketed by South Australia as the state's home of football, and constrained to about 16,500 by its site. It is the best answer currently available to the question of what a football-first Australian ground looks like, and it is also proof of how modest that answer is: a mid-sized suburban ground with a good roof, for the price of about six per cent of a new Olympic stadium.
Perth, Newcastle, Gosford and Campbelltown
HBF Park is a converted ground with a long history, originally an Australian rules venue, now rectangular and shared with Western Force in Super Rugby. It seats about 20,500 and is close to the right size for Perth Glory.
McDonald Jones Stadium in Newcastle is the Knights' ground and seats about 30,000, comfortably more than the Jets need. Polytec Stadium in Gosford, at 20,059, is a council-owned ground on the water that is well sized for the Mariners and has recorded some of the competition's lowest crowds in lean seasons. Campbelltown Sports Stadium is a 17,500-seat council ground in Sydney's south-west.
These four are the least discussed and in some ways the healthiest part of the picture. They are the right shape, roughly the right size, and in three of the four cases football is either the primary tenant or a close second. What they lack is modern facilities, roofing and the corporate infrastructure that generates non-ticket revenue.
New Zealand: two grounds outside the argument
Auckland FC use Go Media Stadium at Mount Smart, a former speedway and long-time home of the New Zealand Warriors, listed at around 25,000 and expandable with temporary seating. Wellington Phoenix use Hnry Stadium, a 34,500-seat multi-purpose venue that also hosts Super Rugby and cricket.
Both are outside the Australian stadium funding system entirely, which is worth remembering when the A-League's venue position is described. Two of the competition's twelve clubs are not part of the Australian argument at all, and Auckland's arrival in 2024-25 added a market averaging above 18,000 in a ground nobody in Australia paid for.
The tier below has the same problem, worse
The venue argument does not stop at the A-League. The Australian Championship, launched in 2025 as a national second tier, and the National Premier Leagues beneath it, are played almost entirely at club-owned or council-owned suburban grounds with capacities between 2,000 and 10,000, terracing rather than seating, and floodlighting that in many cases does not meet broadcast standard.
Those grounds are the one part of Australian football that clubs genuinely control. South Melbourne, Sydney United 58, Marconi, Preston Lions and Wollongong Wolves play at homes their communities built, in some cases before the National Soccer League existed. That is real ownership of the sort no A-League club has, and it comes with real limitations: no roofing, ageing changerooms, restricted parking, and lighting that forces afternoon kick-offs or rules out broadcast entirely.
This creates an odd inversion. The professional tier has excellent buildings it does not own and cannot control. The tier below owns its buildings and cannot afford to upgrade them. Neither position produces a stadium a national competition can grow into, and the gap between the two is one of the practical obstacles to any promotion system, since a promoted club would need a venue meeting A-League licensing standards that almost none of them has. That constraint is examined at promotion and relegation in Australian football.
What the 2023 World Cup demonstrated
Australia co-hosted the 2023 Women's World Cup and staged 35 matches across five host cities. Every venue used was an existing ground: Stadium Australia and Allianz Stadium in Sydney, Suncorp in Brisbane, AAMI Park and the Melbourne Cricket Ground precinct in Melbourne, Coopers Stadium in Adelaide, HBF Park in Perth and the Newcastle ground. Almost all were built for or shared with other codes.
The tournament produced real facility legacy. Pitches, changerooms and lighting were upgraded, twenty venue-specific training sites and nine back-up sites were prepared, gender-neutral changerooms with recovery pools were installed at Stadium Australia, and the federal government committed almost 18 million dollars to Legacy '23 projects including 8.8 million for participation programmes.
What it did not produce was a football stadium. The most-watched football event ever staged in Australia was hosted entirely in buildings borrowed from other sports, and the largest crowd of the tournament, 75,784 for the semi-final, was in a converted Olympic athletics stadium. The consequences of that tournament for the game are traced at what the 2023 World Cup did to Australian football.
Brisbane 2032 and the Perry Park proposal
The 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games are the largest sporting infrastructure programme in Australian history, with roughly 7.1 billion dollars committed to Queensland venues. The centrepiece is a new stadium at Victoria Park costing about 3.785 billion dollars and seating 60,000 for the Games and up to 63,000 afterwards.
It is an oval. The government has confirmed the field of play will be equivalent in size to the Melbourne Cricket Ground, in an east-west configuration settled after discussions with the AFL and cricket. Australia's single largest stadium investment, tied to a Games whose best-attended sport worldwide is football, is being built for Australian rules and cricket.
Olympic football will be played across existing rectangular grounds: Suncorp in Brisbane, Ipswich Stadium, Cbus Super Stadium on the Gold Coast, Sunshine Coast Stadium, Clive Berghofer Stadium in Toowoomba, Queensland Country Bank Stadium in Townsville and Barlow Park in Cairns, plus Sydney Football Stadium and AAMI Park interstate. Nearly every one of those Queensland venues is a rugby league ground. The regional dimension of that is covered at football in regional Australia.
Football Queensland and Football Australia proposed an alternative: a purpose-built rectangular stadium at Perry Park in inner Brisbane, seating 17,000 to 20,000 permanently with capacity for around 13,000 temporary seats during the Games, at a cost of up to 200 million dollars. Perry Park is the traditional home of Queensland football and currently holds about 5,000. The proposal is not part of the official venue plan.
- The anchor tenantA code with large crowds and a broadcast deal identifies a venue need in a market where it has political weight, usually the AFL in the south and west or the NRL in the east.
- The economic caseThe business case is built on attendance, broadcast exposure, event hosting and tourism. Participation numbers appear in the supporting material and carry almost no weight in the financial model.
- The political momentA government commits at or near an election, or a major event such as an Olympic Games or a Commonwealth Games creates a deadline that overrides the normal capital process.
- The buildThe venue is designed around the anchor tenant's requirements, which fixes the shape, the field dimensions, the roof and the seating geometry before any other code is consulted.
- The tenancyOther codes negotiate access afterwards on the operator's terms. Football arrives at this stage, in a building whose shape, calendar and revenue model were settled without it.
A compressed description of the sequence that has produced Australia's major venues over the past three decades. It describes the pattern rather than any single project, and no stage of it is formally documented as policy.
Why stadium money follows crowds and not participants
Football Australia's central public argument is that the country's largest participation base receives the smallest share of sports infrastructure. It is a fair argument and it does not work on stadiums, for a reason worth stating plainly.
A treasury official signing off several hundred million dollars for a stadium needs a return: attendance, ticketing, hospitality, event hosting, tourism, broadcast exposure for the state. Those are crowd metrics, and on crowd metrics football is a clear third among the codes, as the comparison at participation: football, AFL and rugby league compared sets out in full.
Participation arguments do work for community infrastructure, and that is where Football Australia has concentrated its ask: a coordinated 3 billion dollar programme, including 1.56 billion for community changerooms, 851 million for lighting and 391 million for pitch drainage and weather resilience, against an estimated national gap of about 2.8 billion dollars and more than 7,800 identified projects across over 2,000 facilities.
Those are two entirely separate conversations with two separate sets of decision-makers, and running them together is why the sport's stadium advocacy tends to underperform. The community facilities case is much stronger, matters far more to the 1.93 million people who play, and gets much less attention than a stadium render.
What the fix would actually look like
At professional level the realistic list is short. One purpose-built rectangular ground of 17,000 to 20,000 in Brisbane, which is what the Perry Park proposal is. Better tenancy terms at venues where football already plays, covering date priority, pitch standards and a share of matchday revenue. Expansion of AAMI Park if any government ever funds it. Modest upgrades at Gosford, Campbelltown and Perth, where the shape and size are already right and the facilities are dated.
That is a programme in the low hundreds of millions, not billions, and it would materially change how the competition looks on television and feels to attend. It is a fraction of what a single oval stadium costs.
At community level the fix is entirely different: lighting so a ground can carry more teams through winter evenings, drainage so a wet week does not cancel a round, and changerooms so clubs can credibly field girls' and women's teams. That is where the money would do the most good, and it is discussed further at women's football participation in Australia.
Common misconceptions
That the A-League is stuck in oval stadiums. It was, in the 2000s, and it fixed that. Every current ground is rectangular. The problem now is ownership, sharing and size, not shape.
That Allianz Stadium is a football stadium. The Sydney Football Stadium name refers to rugby, in the older Australian usage. It was rebuilt for the Roosters and the Waratahs, with Sydney FC as a tenant.
That clubs choose these venues badly. In most markets there is exactly one rectangular ground of professional standard, and the club plays there or nowhere.
That a bigger stadium is better. For a competition averaging 8,879, a 52,500-seat ground is a liability. The best atmospheres in the league happen in the smallest grounds.
That the Olympics will leave football a venue. The main stadium is an oval and Olympic football is being distributed across existing rugby league grounds. The one football-specific proposal is unfunded.
That this is unique to football. Australian rules and rugby league also play in publicly owned stadiums they do not control. What is specific to football is being third or fourth in the queue in almost every building it uses.
For the buildings themselves, see the venue guides for AAMI Park, Allianz Stadium, Suncorp Stadium and Accor Stadium. For the competition that fills them, see the A-League Men explained, A-League crowds and every A-League club and what defines it. For the governing body making the funding case, see Football Australia explained, and for the wider picture the Australia hub and the sports overview.