100% this. Not hard to understand. The council favoured their prestigious heritage and didn’t want any zoning off in Freo’s proposed expansion. The Freo Prison, the adjacent Parry street with its markets. Council weren’t prepared to give that away.Just for clarity's sake: I thought the issue was that Freo Council straight up wouldn't let us renovate any further. At the time we had the worst training base in the league (or second worst compared to the Lions) and we couldn't so much as upgrade a toilet block without cutting significant red tape and paying a mountain in fees due to "heritage listing".
In the end it sounds like the only point in staying at Fremantle is because we had the word "Fremantle" in our name.
Never got any lee way, no bigger land to expand. It’s a mixture of historical and inadequate planning.
Teams today have ovals greater in size to allow teams to tweak the dimensions of the ovals to suit that week’s game- MCG, Adelaide Oval’s width are different.
With Freo Oval, I remembered they tried to mark the MCG dimensions. Didn’t even fit the width and had to cut it off.
With Cockburn it’ll only expand in time, allow for more family oriented events. The location sucks but the viewing doesn’t. ARC Pros’ far outweigh the limited Freo Oval’s.