Opinion
No one loves Eden Park. Some people think they do because for them it’s rich with personal nostalgia and history has seeped into the fabric of the place, giving it the allure of a national treasure.
But it’s a practical nightmare in every sense. It’s in the middle of a hard-to-access residential area pocket serviced only by the world’s least functional rail platform.
And few people want to walk there from the CBD as the route gives off heavy 1960s communist bloc vibes with all the concrete and high-rise, cheap apartment towers.
The stadium itself has not arisen on one grand vision, but instead has been fiddled with endlessly over the years, almost as if it were a school project where each year group got to design a bit and then it was all squidged together.
It stands not as a bold testament to a city that had the foresight, desire and means to build an iconic venue that could serve the nation for decades to come, but as a testimony to indecision, political wrangling, vested interests and a spectacular failure by decades of public servants to come up with a unified plan on how to spend taxpayer money to ensure there is a portfolio of facilities that meet all of the city’s needs.
Eden Park has styled itself as the national stadium and its place in folklore has been secured by the incredible winning record the All Blacks have enjoyed there since 1994, but a romantic fondness for it shouldn’t be mistaken for architectural brilliance.
It is the preferred home for a world-class team but it’s not a world-class home, a fact implied in the latest plan to upgrade it to a 60,000-capacity venue, with a retractable roof and better access across Sandringham Rd.
So, too, is the revamp proposal an acknowledgment that the stadium needs a definitive decision made about its long-term future as it’s losing hefty amounts of cash.
The message from the Eden Park Trust is clear – leave the stadium as is and it will slowly become a rust bucket while continuing to be a drain on the public purse, or throw hundreds of millions of dollars at it now so it can generate the sort of revenue that will enable it to pay off its debt and in time become a self-sustaining business.
The enigmatic Eden Park chief executive Nick Sautner is Australian and is hardwired to get things done. But what he will soon discover is that in New Zealand, the hardwiring is different.
No one knows better than Aucklanders how to slowly kill civic projects by firstly politicising them and then endlessly debating whether there might be a better – and that always means cheaper – way of getting the same result.
And so while the Aussies do, in New Zealand they don’t - because typically, big-project procrastination lasts long enough for there to be a change of personnel in whatever body is in charge, and they arrive with a new idea and the whole process starts over again.
This is why Auckland will most likely never have a fast rail link to the airport, and why there is a legion of not-quite-fit-for-purpose stadia scattered all over the city.
And it’s also why it’s hard to be even mildly interested in the soon-to-begin second stadium war.
Everyone will realise that Eden Park can’t fix its real issue of being in a hard-to-access pocket of the city among multimillion-dollar homes whose owners don’t want people peeing in their hedges every third weekend, and that a waterfront stadium starts with a crazy-high price tag that could easily bloat.
This second war will, therefore, almost certainly end much like the first, not with a shiny new waterfront stadium or revamped Eden Park, but with a cash bailout for the latter to do some general maintenance work and basic upgrades.
The predictability of the outcome is not the real reason, however, why this war will be as pointless as it will be tedious.
The real issue is that the city’s need for a new, bigger stadium is no more pressing now than it was 17 years ago when the first war broke out between Eden Park and then Prime Minister Helen Clark, who wanted to build on the city’s waterfront.
That war involved a year of bickering and was fought with the weaponry of artists’ impressions and stories of urban rejuvenation.
Both sides argued that if they could build their dream stadium, they would give residents the world-class venue they all supposedly coveted, and in doing so, would transform Auckland into a world-class city.
It was utter nonsense then, just as it is now. Auckland doesn’t need a 60,000-seat state-of-the-art stadium to transform itself, it needs a functioning public transport system, a CBD where people feel safe and for rates to stop exponentially rising as they have been, or at least for more tangible services to justify why they are.
The argument when it comes to stadiums, made famous in the movie Field of Dreams – is that “if you build it, they will come”.
Maybe, but this is Auckland, and so you have to ask, “how will they come?” Will it be by ghost bus? If it’s by train, they will have to hope they get lucky and that the match or concert is on a night that they are running.
If Aucklanders are going to be asked to cough up the better part of a billion dollars for an infrastructure project, surely most would prefer that it was to build a better, cleaner, system to get around the city, rather than put a roof over the heads of a few thousand Blues fans.
And this brings us to the biggest issue of all. The ambition of wanting to build a 60,000-seat stadium is admirable, but it’s also misplaced because Auckland needs something much less grandiose and smaller-scale.
New Zealand has won hosting rights to two Rugby World Cups and one Fifa World Cup in the last 12 years – all without the lure of a fancy-pants stadium.
More importantly, it would be madly excessive to build a stadium with 60,000 seats which maybe only the All Blacks, twice a year, and Taylor Swift, if she ever comes, could fill.
A boutique, 25,000-seat, rectangular facility serviced by reliable train and bus links has a much stronger case to be funded.
Build something of that size - modern, functional, comfortable and intimate – and offer it up to the Blues, the Warriors, the Phoenix, Moana Pasifika and ideally even make it the permanent and only home of the Black Ferns.
European cities have municipal stadiums with multiple tenants and don’t get all caught up in this idea of one team, one venue. And it works – fans come, dollars roll in and loyalty builds.
But Auckland seems determined to have its second stadium war, one where the two opposing groups will battle ferociously over something this city doesn’t need.
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