By Adam Carey
In 1962, the Victorian Football League bought 80 hectares of cow paddocks in Mulgrave – just beyond Melbourne’s fast-encroaching city limits.
“Upon this vast expanse, the league is now to establish its own home – a football stadium as fine as any on earth, with ancillary grounds where not only football but many other games will be played and enjoyed,” the league boasted in its master plan for VFL Park.
Western Melbourne Group chairman Jason Sourasis (centre), pictured with Western United footballers Jake Najdovski (left) and Abel Walatee.Credit: Jason South
Sixty-two years later, one heritage-listed stand is all that survives of the stadium. The playing field has also been preserved but is ringed by luxury townhouses.
Sixty kilometres away from VFL Park on Melbourne’s western fringe, a similarly ambitious – and speculative – sporting vision is unfolding today. But soccer is the sport powering this vision, and property development is already at its heart.
The setting is Tarneit, where three soccer pitches and a 5000-seat pavilion have just been built among the peri-urban farms on the western side of the regional rail link.
In a public-private partnership that is being touted as the first of its kind in Australia, the City of Wyndham has handed fledgling A-Leagues club Western United’s owner Western Melbourne Group 63 hectares of council-owned land, upon which the group has committed to build a 15,000-seat rectangular stadium, using private funds.
Three soccer pitches and a pavilion stand among the farms on the western fringe of Melbourne.Credit: Jason South
In exchange, the club has been given the right to develop a new housing estate around the stadium.
State government-approved plans for the estimated $2 billion development include 1000 homes, ranging from seven-storey apartment buildings to detached houses, as well as retail, medical and health facilities, sports administration offices, indoor sports and parkland.
This agricultural expanse on Melbourne’s western periphery has been rezoned into a blank slate for an outer suburban council and a small soccer club to build their blueprint for a new suburb centred on sporting culture.
“We are building a city that gives the area in the west of Melbourne some social tribalism linked to sport, health and wellness,” Western Melbourne Group chairman Jason Sourasis said.
The few thousand Western United fans who visited the club’s new Tarneit base for its first home game last month would have needed a good imagination to picture this promised land.
The site is so isolated, signage in club colours was strung up on fences along the partially constructed road leading towards the stadium. It read: “NO, YOU’RE NOT LOST … KEEP GOING!”
A sign along the road towards the partially developed Wyndham Stadium precinct.
A rollcall of Australian sporting stars have invested in the project, including AFL greats Adam Goodes and Scott Pendlebury, Australian basketballer Dante Exum, tennis player Thanasi Kokkinakis and Melbourne Storm players Christian Welch and Ryan Papenhuyzen.
In a statement, Goodes told The Age he was passionate about the group’s vision to build a city underpinned by sport and health.
“Growing up, we moved around a lot and I found that football, which was the first sport I fell in love with, was the best way to help us integrate into any new community I went into,” he said.
“It was truly inclusive, diverse and helped me and my brothers make new friends and feel part of the community.”
Sourasis said Western Melbourne Group had already invested about $100 million into the precinct.
It has done this in part by borrowing $50 million from New York stock exchange-listed technology company Johnson Controls.
“People don’t realise: yes we are building a sport franchise, but at the same time we’ve been paddling so fast underwater on the property side,” Sourasis said.
Melbourne’s financially distressed rugby union club, the Rebels, could join Western United in Tarneit, perhaps by next year, should the club survive Rugby Australia’s attempt to shut them down.
Rebels chief executive Georgia Widdup said there was “a real opportunity to locate the team out among this huge population growth corridor”.
“At the moment it’s a stadium in a huge amount of land, so I think there is a bit of vision required to see what is possible, but I’ve been down there, it’s great, and I see no reason why we couldn’t be playing games there in the near future,” Widdup said.
An artist’s impression of Wyndham City Stadiumh, which is planned to be built in a public-private partnership between the City of Wyndham and the owners of A-League team Western United.
The question of how fans will reach the future stadium remains unresolved. The master plan includes a train station just 600 metres from the stadium on Sayers Road, but there are no funds for it and the state government has not committed to building it.
Without the station, Wyndham stadium risks being the centrepiece of yet another car-dependent outer Melbourne suburb.
At its March 26 council meeting, Wyndham city councillors said that it is “of concern that the state government has not made any financial commitments to the delivery of the Sayers Road railway station, which is a critical piece of infrastructure for the precinct”.
Wyndham deputy mayor Josh Gilligan said Western Melbourne Group were subject to a tight timeline under its contract with the council to meet its development targets, including building the 15,000-seat stadium in time for the 2026-27 A-Leagues season.
The master plan for Wyndham stadium envisions 1000 homes and a railway station within a short walk.
The council has the power to reclaim the land it acquired in 2013, should deadlines be missed. Gilligan said the stadium and sports precinct would be “an intergenerational asset” for Wyndham residents.
“We entered into a heads of agreement with Western Melbourne Group to deliver a stadium, and in return, they can use profits from the house and land packages they sell around the stadium,” he said.
“We are satisfied that delivers an overall social good on land that otherwise would have delivered generic house and land without too much social infrastructure.”
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