Broncos chief says filling Victoria Park is Lions’ biggest challenge

The Brisbane Broncos have thrown down the gauntlet to their cross-code rivals, with chief executive Dave Donaghy telling his Brisbane Lions counterpart his greatest challenge will be filling the new 63,000-seat Brisbane Stadium at Victoria Park.

Construction on the new stadium, which would serve as Brisbane’s Olympic stadium in 2032, was expected to start later this year, with the Lions to move in for the 2033 season.

The Lions’ record crowd at their current Gabba home was 37,478 for a qualifying final against Richmond in 2019.

Speaking alongside Lions chief executive Sam Graham at a QUT business leaders’ lunch on Thursday, Donaghy said the Lions’ looming stadium upgrade was both an opportunity and a risk.

“His opportunity is also his biggest challenge – that growth,” Donaghy said.

Donaghy drew on his time at Melbourne Storm, where he was chief executive from 2015 to 2021, to illustrate how stadium size could expose the limits of fan demand, likening Melbourne’s sporting landscape to Brisbane’s evolving one.

“When I was in Melbourne with the Storm, we always had the saying the AFL is religion in Melbourne and Storm’s just a little church on the hill – just need a few little parishioners to fill AAMI Park,” he said.

“The Lions are going to have a stadium twice the size.”

While acknowledging Brisbane did not have the same saturation of professional teams as Melbourne, Donaghy said reduced competition did not guarantee consistent crowds.

“The benefit these guys don’t have that, say Storm have in Melbourne, is they’ve only got one other team in Brisbane,” he said.

“They don’t have the same competition or the challenge.”

Donaghy said the days of considering the Lions as a foreign code in rugby league heartland were over.

“I don’t necessarily think the Lions now are a competitor or a challenger brand in a traditional market – they’re here,” he said.

“So for them – and for Sam leading it – it’s about how they get to that point of having performance meet the opportunity [of the] increased capacity, because it can be a fickle market at times.”

Graham said while Brisbane was a “one-team town” in AFL terms, on-field success alone would not guarantee growth.

“How do you get more people [than at] the Gabba, engage with more people through our different channels – AFLW, digitally, and other ways – to fill that stadium, that’s our thing,” he said.

Graham said even with the Lions’ on-field ups and downs in the AFL over the past 10 years, the club’s membership had reached 75,000.

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