Building a Sports Nation, Part 5.
Building a Sports Nation, Part 5.
By Marc Esterer and Alexander Strulak
Sports infrastructure is often the most visible expression of sporting ambition.
A new stadium can reshape a skyline. A high-performance center can signal national sporting progress. An arena can demonstrate that a country is capable of hosting the world’s biggest events.
But a building is only a sporting asset when people use it.
A 50,000-seat stadium active ten days a year may create less sporting value than a network of modest facilities occupied from morning until night. A world-class training center in the wrong location may remain inaccessible to the athletes it was intended to serve. And a facility designed around one sport, one event or one user can become expensive capacity waiting for demand that never arrives.
The contrast between Athens 2004 and Sydney 2000 illustrates the challenge. Athens became a warning of what can happen when parts of an event-driven infrastructure portfolio struggle to find sufficient recurring demand and viable operating models after the Games. Sydney took a different approach, deliberately distinguishing between the temporary capacity required for the Olympics and the permanent capacity expected to be useful afterward.
The difference is not simply good versus bad legacy.
It is whether infrastructure is treated primarily as a construction project or as usable capacity within a sports system.
That distinction matters far beyond mega-events. Governments make the same choices when deciding whether to build a regional stadium, expand a high-performance center, refurbish a swimming pool or open school facilities to community sport.
The starting point should therefore not be the building. It should be four questions:
Does the facility network match where participation and high-performance demand actually exist?
Can athletes, clubs and communities realistically access the capacity that has been built?
Are facilities designed and managed to maximize use across the day, week and year?
Are infrastructure investments guided by a long-term view of participation, demographics and future events, or by individual opportunities to build?
The answers determine whether infrastructure becomes a productive part of the sports system, or an expensive asset the sports system has to support.
The first infrastructure question is not how many facilities a country has.
It is whether it has the right facilities, in the right places, at the right scale.
An infrastructure inventory can count stadiums, sports halls, swimming pools, pitches and high-performance centers. That describes supply. It says much less about whether supply matches demand.
A rapidly growing city may lack basic community capacity while another region maintains underused stadiums. Elite athletes may have access to sophisticated national centers while local clubs cannot obtain training slots. One sport may have excess capacity while another has years-long waiting lists.
Brazil’s 2014 FIFA World Cup illustrates the problem particularly well.
Brazil is one of the world’s great football nations, but national enthusiasm for football did not automatically translate into sufficient recurring demand in every host city.
The Arena Amazonia in Manaus, built for around 42,000 spectators, hosted four matches during the World Cup and cost approximately US$300 million. Yet the entire 2014 Amazonas state championship averaged only 662 paying spectators per match. The issue was not the architectural quality of the stadium. It was the relationship between capacity and everyday demand.
A similar challenge emerged with the rebuilt Estadio Nacional Mane Garrincha in Brasilia. During a World Cup, a major stadium could accommodate exceptional tournament demand. Outside the tournament, Brasilia lacked a major top-flight club capable of generating comparable attendance regularly; local clubs already operated in substantially smaller venues.
This is why national infrastructure planning should start with a demand map, not an architectural brief.
That map should understand:
Population and demographic growth
Participation rates and unmet demand by sport
Geographic gaps
School and club requirements
High-performance needs
Current facility utilization and waiting lists
Transport and travel times
Realistic competition and event demand
Sydney’s planning for the 2000 Olympic Games demonstrates the opposite logic.
The Games temporarily required a main stadium capable of accommodating around 110,000 spectators. Sydney did not assume the same capacity would be required permanently. Stadium Australia was reconfigured after the Games to approximately 83,500 seats.
The Sydney International Aquatic Centre followed the same principle. Temporary seating lifted it to around 17,000 for Olympic competition, against a permanent capacity of about 10,000.
The principle is simple: Peak demand should not automatically become permanent capacity.
And the same logic applies far beyond mega-events.
A government considering a regional football stadium should understand ordinary league attendance before designing capacity around an international match or cup final. A national swimming strategy should understand pool demand, travel times and community use before deciding how many competition-standard aquatic centers to construct.
A leading infrastructure system is not defined by how much it builds. It is defined by how closely capacity follows demonstrated need.
A football pitch can be located two kilometers from someone’s home but unavailable every evening. A school may own an excellent sports hall that remains locked outside teaching hours. A public swimming pool can technically be open to everybody while prices exclude a significant share of the population.
Accessibility therefore has several dimensions:
Geographic access: how far must users travel?
Financial access: can the intended users afford it?
Time access: is capacity available when people actually want to participate?
Physical access: can people of different ages and abilities use the facility?
Administrative access: how easy is it to discover, book and enter?
That changes the maturity question considerably.
A national infrastructure strategy should not only ask: How many people live near a sports facility? It should ask: How many people can realistically obtain the right facility, at the right time and at an affordable price?
Munich’s Olympiapark demonstrates why this broader definition matters.
Built for the 1972 Olympic Games, the precinct was never limited to a collection of enclosed competition venues. Its major sporting facilities were integrated with parkland, public space, recreational areas, paths and other everyday uses.
More than five decades later, that integration remains central to the site’s value.
The Olympic Park has recorded more than 235 million registered visitors since 1972, including visitors to sporting, cultural and commercial events as well as leisure and tourism facilities. In 2025 alone, it recorded a further 4.6 million. Thousands of people who use the open park for walking, running and recreation are not fully captured in those figures.
The Olympiastadion provides major-event capacity. The Olympiahalle serves indoor sport and entertainment. Swimming facilities, recreational spaces and the park itself serve different users and different levels of sport.
Together, they allow infrastructure created for extraordinary competition to remain embedded in ordinary city life. That is a fundamentally different proposition from treating sports infrastructure as isolated buildings surrounded by fences and parking.
For governments, accessibility therefore requires thinking about infrastructure as a network of usable opportunities: Some demand requires a national stadium. Some requires a neighborhood pitch or public swimming pool. Some can be satisfied simply by opening an existing school sports hall for additional hours each week.
This leads to one of the most important infrastructure principles:
The infrastructure gap is not always a construction gap. Sometimes it is an access gap inside the facilities already built.
Sports facilities are traditionally described through physical specifications: Seats. Courts. Pitches. Pools. Square meters. Those measures tell us what an asset contains. They do not tell us what it produces.
Athens 2004 demonstrates the distinction.
The IOC’s later review of the Games found that 75% of the 32 permanent competition venues remained in use, a figure a subsequent IOC update revised to 67%, meaning that Athens should not simply be characterized as a completely failed infrastructure program. But eight permanent venues were no longer in use, with the former Helliniko Olympic Complex representing the most visible concentration of underused and deteriorating assets.
The more useful lesson lies in understanding why particular facilities struggled.
Several highly specialized venues served sports without sufficient recurring domestic demand to sustain Olympic-scale infrastructure. Permanent capacity had been created around an extraordinary event and subsequently needed to find an ordinary-year purpose.
Munich shows what can happen when the opposite is possible: the use of a facility evolves.
The Olympiastadion began as the venue for Olympic athletics and ceremonies. It later hosted the 1974 FIFA World Cup final, served as Bayern Munich’s home ground for 33 years, staged major athletics championships and developed into one of Germany’s major open-air concert venues.
Since September 1972, it has attracted approximately 55 million spectators across more than 2,200 events.
The Olympiahalle has adapted even more extensively. Originally used for Olympic gymnastics and the handball finals, it evolved into a multi-purpose arena for sports competitions, concerts, entertainment and shows. By the end of 2025, it had hosted 3,513 events attracting 35.7 million spectators.
The value of these facilities did not depend on protecting their original Olympic function. It depended on their ability to change function as demand changed. That should alter how governments assess infrastructure performance.
Instead of focusing predominantly on physical capacity, mature systems should monitor:
Utilization rate: occupied hours divided by available hours
Peak versus off-peak demand: at what times does capacity remain unused?
User mix: how much capacity is used by communities, clubs, schools, federations, elite athletes, events and commercial users?
Cost per utilized hour: what does the facility cost relative to the amount of capacity actually consumed?
Revenue and cost recovery: where appropriate, how much operating expenditure can the asset recover?
Repeat use and user satisfaction: is the facility merely available, or valued by its users?
Adaptability: can programming, configuration or user groups change when demand changes?
A facility operating consistently below its expected utilization should trigger action.
Programming can change. Opening hours can expand. Pricing can be adjusted. Additional sports or user groups can be introduced. Spaces can be redesigned. Commercial uses can supplement sporting demand.
And where the underlying demand no longer exists, conversion or repurposing should become an explicit option.
A leading infrastructure system therefore does not simply maintain facilities. It actively manages demand and capacity.
The real KPI is not how many seats were built. It is how many useful hours the facility creates.
The least mature infrastructure systems react to opportunities. A city offers land. A federation requests a national center. A major event creates venue requirements. A regional government wants a stadium.
Each project may make sense individually. Collectively, they can still create the wrong infrastructure network. That is the difference between having projects and having a masterplan.
Australia provides a useful current example. In 2026, the Australian Sports Commission launched Places to Play, the country’s first National Community Sport Infrastructure Plan. The ten-year plan puts participation outcomes at the center of infrastructure decision-making and explicitly promotes better use, configuration and sharing of existing facilities before assuming that additional construction is necessary.
The plan also sits within Australia’s broader national sports direction that creates an important connection between participation demand, long-term sports-system needs and major-event investment, including Sport Horizon 2024-2034 and the decade of major sporting events leading to Brisbane 2032:
2026-2029: Collaboration, knowledge sharing, capability building and more equitable use of existing infrastructure through participation-first thinking.
2030-2032: System reform, embedding the change and modernizing how infrastructure decisions are made.
2033-2036: Building on momentum and growing the system’s long-term strategic capability.
New Zealand applies a similar logic through its Spaces and Places Framework 2024. Rather than prescribing a fixed list of facilities, it requires decision-makers to establish an identified need and viability before progressing to design and construction. Its principles include accessibility, financial sustainability, connectivity and future-proofing, with explicit consideration of changing populations and community needs.
These models highlight what a leading infrastructure masterplan should connect:
Participation: where is demand growing, declining or currently unmet?
Demographics: where will populations grow and which communities remain underserved?
Existing capacity: which assets are full, deteriorating or underutilized?
Future events and performance needs: which investments are genuinely required, and can they also solve long-term system needs?
That means being prepared to accelerate a project where demand grows faster than expected, but also to refurbish, resize, postpone or cancel one where the original assumptions no longer hold.
An ad hoc system asks: What can we build? A leading system asks:
What capacity will the sports system need over the next decade, and is building something new actually the best way to provide it?
Vinciamo Sports
Power Insight.
The article series and engagement is led by Marc Esterer, Director Business Development, and Alexander Strulak, Strategic Partnerships Advisor & Communications Manager.
A note on process: AI tools were used to support parts of the research, data visualisation and editorial refinement of this article. The analysis draws on the studies and sources listed below.
Sources: International Olympic Committee / Olympic Studies Centre (Over 125 Years of Olympic Venues: Post-Games Use, including the Athens 2004 venue review; Sydney 2000 venue planning and post-Games configuration); Olympiapark Muenchen GmbH (Olympic Park, Olympiastadion and Olympiahalle visitor and event statistics); The Guardian, NPR and ESPN (Arena Amazonia cost, capacity and World Cup use); Brazilian investigative reporting via BRIO and UOL (2014 Amazonas state championship attendance); Reuters and ESPN (post-World Cup demand and club infrastructure in Brasilia); Australian Sports Commission (Places to Play: Australia’s National Community Sport Infrastructure Plan, 2026); Australian Government (Sport Horizon: National Sport Strategy 2024-2034); Sport New Zealand (Spaces and Places Framework 2024).
A. Strulak writes on sports business, commercial strategy and the economics of rights. Vinciamo Sports, Sport. Reimagined.
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