interesting calculation, "Pessimistic"! It makes sense that major sporting events abroad are so expensive when one sees that 200,000 could be seated for a hypothetical Grand Final in land-surfeited suburban Melbourne.
Interesting argument. I am sure that the club which would be most protective with hindsight is St. Kilda, because the culture of the outer suburbs in its catchment is hardly conductive to the sort of football played in a closed roof stadium: pacy, hard players do not grow out of a noncompetitive culture. Without Waverley, Hawthorn - had they survived - might have made keeping Moorabbin far more viable than it was by the 1990s. Hawthorn wanted to play its home games at Moorabbin in the 1970s and without a doubt it would have been a much more natural home than Princes Park.
In the 1930s, St. Kilda was an extremely poor but innovative club (they were the first to recruit from New South Wales) and they must have hoped that owning their own ground would in the long term allow them to reduce expenses - which at large were not on players since they could not pay them anything like the sums allowed by the Coulter Law. even had the league not had an iron grip on ticket prices, it is unlikely St. Kilda could have done anything since in such conservative, almost pastoral suburbs the optimum ticket price would be very low.
He did: indeed Clement kicked five twice in successive games at that time, and kicked 27 goals in 21 games that year as against just 24 in 209 games for the rest of his career. He played 77 games for no goals between 2002 and 2005.
Originally the AFL did keep it, and were looking to rentit out to various leagues, however, less then a month after the final game it had already become a drug den
