Will new Sydney Football Stadium suit Sydney FC

Major questions are surfacing whether a new Sydney Football Stadium is where tenants want to be. Sydney FC, for one, may be better suited sticking to their current arrangements at smaller venues.

As it stands there won’t be an electronic ‘curtain’ at the new Sydney Football Stadium to cover thousands of empty seats.

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The state government is set to appoint a construction firm for the rebuild of the Sydney Football Stadium by Christmas but serious concerns are growing that the result will be a $729 million white elephant.

As Sydney FC host another fixture at Kogarah’s Jubilee Oval on Saturday night, questions are being asked of whether the Sky Blues would be better sited at a smaller venue than the SFS long term, if the new stadium is built in a way that means it is almost always two-thirds empty and devoid of atmosphere for all of its tenants.

After Lend Lease walked away in July, either Multiplex and John Holland will be appointed in the next fortnight to build the new stadium, The Daily Telegraph understands.

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As it stands there won’t be an electronic ‘curtain’ at the new SFS to cover empty seats.

But the design as it stands will not have the capability to screen off part of the 45,000-seat venue – switching between so-called “club mode” and “championship mode” - even though its tenants all average regular season crowds around 15,000.

It’s understood that without it, Sydney FC may have to question whether the SFS is the right venue long term, after the success of hosting games at Jubilee and Leichhardt Ovals.

Currently the Sky Blues will have just four years of their existing tenancy agreement left when the stadium is due to be finished in 2022.

All tenants were initially promised by the SCG Trust, which runs the SFS, that an option such as a LED curtain to cover the upper tiers would be included in the design.

NRL champions, the Roosters, told The Daily Telegraph they still consider it “fundamentally important” to the design.

But the rebuild is out of the Trust’s hands, being overseen by Infrastructure NSW, and the curtain option was dropped by the government to save some $46m.

Infrastructure NSW says that “the stadium’s roof and upper tier is being designed to permit the future installation of a club mode curtain” – but the fear is that persuading government to spend money on a curtain years after the stadium is built will be much harder.

Sydney FC regularly played at a less than half-full Allianz Stadium.

“The LED curtain was a key feature to the original design of the stadium that we supported,” said Roosters CEO Joe Kelly.

“In the context of our regular crowds and creating the best possible match day experience, the inclusion of this technology is fundamentally important.

“It would be a shame if we didn’t include this capability considering the cost when amortised over the life of the new stadium.”

Sydney FC CEO Danny Townsend would not be drawn on the question of a curtain, but said: “The experience of hosting our games in smaller venues has been excellent so far and we’ve been able to provide our members with a fantastic atmosphere and family feel in each, mixed with the type of social occasion and event traditional football fans desire.

“But at the same time we are looking forward to moving back into our brand new, world class stadium at Moore Park which will have modern, state of the art facilities and the latest in technological advancements, providing our members with a world class fan experience.”

Playing at smaller suburban grounds has proved a winner for Sydney FC. Picture: AAP

Stadiums in the MLS have shown what architects say are relatively simple ways to shrink the stadium visually. The Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta has a capacity of more than 71,000 but that can be cut to 42,500 thanks to a series of vertical LED curtains that drop down from the roof and cover the upper bowl of seats.

Similarly at BC Place in Vancouver, home of the White Caps, horizontal winches can extend a series of drapes over the lower bowl to create a secondary roof over the lower bowl of seating. These were retro-fitted less than a decade ago when the stadium’s inflatable roof was replaced.

Bill Johnson is design principal for HOK, a global architecture practice that led the Mercedes Benz Stadium design. He told The Daily Telegraph that the need to have a smaller-scale mode was added to the brief quite late in the design process once Arthur Blank, owner of the Atlanta Falcons NFL team, decided to bid of an MLS franchise that became Atlanta United.

Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz stadium featuring screened-off seats.

The solution was a “scrim”, similar to the gauze backdrops used in theatres to project images onto but in this case made of a LED mesh.

“We already knew it was important to design a multipurpose venue, so we’d thought about factors such as the premium seating being accessible even in a smaller mode,” Johnson said.

“Everything we design is predicated on scalability. It mostly is to do with the visuals of the stadium, the seat colour, using lighting to de-emphasise seats you might not use.

Screens cover seating at BC Place in Vancouver, Canada. Picture: Getty Images

“But we used a suspended ‘scrim’ from the roof to the front edge of the upper bowl, which becomes an opportunity to display the logo of the club or a sponsor.

“It’s pretty straightforward technology, it operates in the way a scrim does in a theatre. It’s not a great technological challenge and it’s much cheaper and simpler than retracting seats, which is the only other way of reducing the scale of a stadium.”