so it was great to be asked by Michael Bleby about the plight of Western United Football Club.
Western United has had enormous in-game success given its short existence (not least of which because they stole the Team 11 colour scheme!). But the plan to build a new stadium in Tarneit in partnership with Wyndham City Council has taken longer to eventuate.
This approach certainly makes it more feasible for the stadium to come to fruition – something that would be extremely difficult to achieve in a standard "on-market" transaction. But it is not immune to broader market challenges, including a different funding environment and substantial construction cost increases since the expansion process concluded in 2018:
“If they (WMG) are struggling to get it done under those circumstances, you can only imagine how much harder it would be for someone to do it on a purely commercial arm’s-length basis,” says Shifman.
“It’s whether or not they can find the right long-term patient investment capital to see the long-term benefit. If they can do that, they (WMG) will get it up. If a financier doesn’t have that long-term view, it’s going to be harder.”
Maximising a transformational project like this requires significant investment to unlock the right infrastructure, which in this case is a new train station to the site to augment the current road access:
Shifman was part of a syndicate that unsuccessfully bid for the A-League licence that WMG ultimately secured for the 2019 season.
Shifman’s syndicate, Team 11, proposed to build a new stadium on a brownfield site directly opposite Dandenong railway station in Melbourne’s south-east, and he reckons WMG will need the state government to come to the party by providing infrastructure like a train station.
Wyndham council has given its approval for a train station to be built beside WMG’s proposed 15,000-seat stadium, but the Victorian government said it was still considering multiple locations for a new train station in Tarneit.
“Only the state government builds new train stations and train line extensions,” says Shifman.
“That’s going to be a massive plank in terms of unlocking that (WMG) site for a prospective stadium.”
🏟️Will this be a case of "build it and they will come"? Let's hope only good news comes out of the creditor meeting so WU continues what it has started for Melbourne's West.