What Is Community Sport Worth? Tasmania's Councils Have Very Different Answers

Photo courtesy of Pulse Tasmania

I thought this would be simple.

Clarence sporting clubs have been making plenty of noise about the cost of using council facilities. Clarence Zebras is one of them.

So I thought I would have a look.

What does it cost a community club to hire a ground in Tasmania? Is Clarence really that different?

Tasmania has 29 councils. How hard could it be?

Quite hard as it turns out.

I got through 17 of them before I ran out of patience and looking at published fee schedules.

I did not find 17 versions of the same system with different prices.

I found six different systems.

Six ways to charge community sport

Some councils charge by the hour with different rates for juniors and seniors and for matches and training.

Some charge one flat hourly rate.

Some charge by the day or the session.

Some charge per match day.

One charges by the number of teams a club fields.

One charges each club a flat annual fee based on its size.

Then come the lights. The changerooms. The kiosks. The clubrooms. The seasonal discounts. The casual rates.

Just when you think you have one council worked out you cross a boundary and start again.

Let's start with Clarence

Clarence's 2026-27 schedule looks straightforward at first.

Junior training is $25 an hour. A junior match is $35.

Senior training is $47. A senior match is $57.

Then football gets a category of its own.

An NPL soccer match is $85.50 an hour. There is no junior rate.

Lights are another $15 an hour.

Small-sided junior grounds are different again. $5.50 an hour per ground without fixed goals. $11 with them.

So inside one council the question "what does a football match cost?" has at least four answers.

Cross the river and everything changes

The City of Hobart sorts its grounds into four levels.

Take a Level 2 ground such as Clare Street Oval or Soldiers Memorial.

Junior training is $31 an hour. A junior match is $45.

Senior training is $48. A senior match is $89.

So Hobart looks dearer than Clarence.

Except Hobart gives seasonal hirers 25 per cent off ground hire.

That takes the $89 senior match to $66.75. The $45 junior match drops to $33.75.

Which is less than Clarence's $35.

Lights are not a flat fee either. Hobart adds 15 per cent to the ground charge.

Same sport. Different sums.

Then there is Glenorchy

Glenorchy publishes a rate for every ground.

KGV is $76 an hour. North Chigwell and Prince of Wales Bay are $42 or $48 depending on the pitch. Juniors pay half.

But those are casual rates only. The schedule says so.

Football Tasmania holds the head lease at KGV.

So the published price tells us nothing about what Glenorchy Knights pays.

That problem turns up again and again.

The advertised price of a ground is not necessarily what the resident club pays for a season on it.

And then I found Taroona

Kingborough does not charge its tenant clubs by the hour at all.

It sorts them. Large, medium or small. Urban, rural or junior.

Then it charges each club one fee for the year.

Kingborough's own manual names Taroona Football Club as a Medium Urban club.

Last year that band cost $2,575. A Large Urban club paid $5,150.

It is worth knowing how that came about.

In 2022 Kingborough proposed an hourly charge. Clubs objected. They argued for a seasonal fee on a sliding scale by club size.

That is more or less what they got.

Now put Taroona beside Clarence Zebras.

Two football clubs on opposite sides of the Derwent.

Under Kingborough's published system, Taroona has been classified as a Medium Urban club paying a flat annual ground-user fee.

Clarence Zebras is billed by the hour with separate prices for juniors and seniors and for matches and training. Plus an NPL rate.

Club president Nick Di Giovanni has said publicly that before the Zebras even open their clubroom doors each year he has to find around $78,000 to meet these costs.

It would be very tempting to put $2,575 beside $78,000 in enormous type and leave it there.

I can't.

I don't know what Taroona's fee covers. I don't know whether lights and clubrooms are extra. I don't know what band the club is in this year.

And the $78,000 is the Zebras' own figure. I haven't seen the breakdown.

So I am not going to tell you one club pays 30 times what the other does.

The evidence doesn't show that.

What it does show is two councils answering the same question in completely different ways.

Keep driving

Derwent Valley hires out its soccer ovals at Tynwald Park by the day. $132.

Brighton charges $48 an hour at most grounds with a three-hour minimum. Lights at Thompson Oval are $91 an hour.

Burnie charges a soccer club per game day and a separate fee for a season of training.

Launceston sells blocks of time. Last year a training session was $58 for a two-hour minimum.

Meander Valley charges per team per season. Last year a senior men's soccer team was $330. A senior women's team was $165. A junior team was $82.50.

Last year Sorell charged for soccer lights by the number of towers you switched on.

Then there is George Town.

Its schedule lists the soccer ground at $18 an hour.

It also says the charges do not apply to current sporting clubs using the facilities.

So in one Tasmanian municipality the resident club appears to pay no ground hire.

In another we are working out whether a match is $85.50 an hour before the lights go on.

I'm not saying one council is right and another is wrong.

I'm wondering how we arrived at such different answers.

And then there are the clubrooms

So far I have only been talking about grass.

Football clubs don't run on grass alone.

They need somewhere to get changed. Somewhere to run a canteen. Somewhere to hold a presentation night.

And this is where comparing councils gets even harder.

Some councils publish separate prices for buildings and rooms.

Brighton lists the Seymour Street Clubrooms at $48 an hour.

Derwent Valley charges $263 a day for a pavilion.

Clarence lists the Wentworth Park Sports Centre at $15 an hour for sporting activities. The kiosk is another $15.

Hobart also publishes separate charges for some facilities.

North Hobart Oval is a good example. The ground hire specifically excludes the Plaister Stand and the function room has its own separate hire charge.

Others tell you there is an arrangement and leave it there.

Meander Valley says the fee for the Prospect Vale Park clubrooms is determined by the leaseholder.

Kingborough says pavilions and clubrooms are by special arrangement.

At Somerset the soccer club manages the ground itself.

And even where a council publishes an hourly or daily price for a clubroom, that still doesn't tell us what the resident sporting club pays to occupy the whole facility for a season.

Does it pay rent?

Does it pay for power and water?

Who cleans the building?

Who pays for repairs?

Who maintains the changerooms?

Who replaces something when it breaks?

That is the problem.

The price of hiring the grass is relatively easy to find.

The total cost of being the club that lives there often isn't.

Try running junior football across council boundaries

This matters to me because of the Central Region Junior Football Association.

Every weekend we run many matches across many municipalities.

We rent our Hobart grounds directly from the City.

Everywhere else the clubs pay their own council and we give them a rebate.

So we get to see what different councils are charging for junior football.

In Clarence a junior match is $35 an hour. Unless it is small-sided. Then it is $5.50 or $11.

At North Chigwell or Prince of Wales Bay the junior casual rate works out at $21 or $24.

In Hobart it is $49, $45, $36 or $35 depending on the ground. Less 25 per cent because we book for the season.

There is a catch.

If a round is washed out we pay anyway.

Same association. Same competition. Same children.

What it costs to put them on a pitch depends on which side of a boundary the pitch sits.

So is Clarence expensive?

I set out to answer that.

I still can't give you a simple answer.

Hourly rates are not enough.

You need to know whether a club is a casual or seasonal hirer. Whether it has a lease. Whether someone else holds the head lease. Whether lights and changerooms are included. Whether the club maintains the place itself. Whether the council charges by the hour, the match, the team, the season or the year.

Sometimes you can read the whole schedule and still not know what the resident club pays.

So before anyone declares one council cheap and another expensive we need to be sure we are comparing the same things.

There is a reason councils charge

This needs saying.

Sporting grounds don't maintain themselves.

Grass has to be cut and watered. Lights use power. Toilets need cleaning. Drainage, fencing and buildings wear out.

Ratepayers carry a lot of that whether they play sport or not.

Councils also own very different grounds and have very different budgets.

So I don't expect every council to charge the same.

A basic training paddock should not cost what a top competition venue costs.
There is another comparison worth making.

Hobart doesn't expect its Aquatic Centre to pay for itself.

People pay to swim. They pay memberships and other charges. But those fees don't cover the full cost of running the place. In 2025–26 the Centre was budgeted to bring in about $7.3 million in fees and charges against expenses of about $8.9 million.

Ratepayers make up the difference.

And I don't have a problem with that. An aquatic centre is a community facility. It gets people moving, keeps them active and provides something valuable to the community.

But aren't our sporting grounds doing much the same thing?

Maybe the question isn't whether the people using these facilities should contribute. Of course they should.

The question is how much?

But what is it worth to have people playing?

There is another side to this ledger.

We can work out what it costs to mow a football ground.

We can work out what the lights cost to run.

It is much harder to put a price on hundreds of people turning up to use that ground every week.

Children are moving.

Adults are staying active.

Teenagers belong to something.

Parents who would never otherwise meet are standing on a sideline talking.

People who live alone have somewhere to be on a Saturday.

We talk a great deal about inactivity and loneliness. We worry about mental health and the cost of preventable illness.

Community sport is already doing something about all of them.

Most of it is delivered by volunteers.

Then we send the club an invoice.

Here is the part that surprised me.

I could only find figures for two councils.

In both cases the invoices didn't come close to covering the bill.

In 2022 City of Hobart officers reported that sportsground fees were recovering about 15 per cent of what the City spent on its grounds. That was based on benchmarking from around 2017 so I am not suggesting it is the figure today.

The same year Kingborough said it was spending $1.4 million a year maintaining its grounds. Its new club fees would cover only a small part of that.

Ratepayers were already paying for most of it.

Maybe that is exactly what we want them to do.

What value do we put on sport?

Governments put public money into elite sport and major stadiums for all sorts of reasons.

Visitors. Jobs. Civic pride. The hope that it inspires people to play.

Community sport doesn't need to promise that people will play one day.

They are already playing.

Every Saturday morning the evidence is running around on the grass.

And there is Australian research that puts a value on it.

In 2018 KPMG and La Trobe University estimated that Australia's community sport facilities generate more than $16.2 billion a year in economic, social and health value.

That was $6.3 billion in economic benefit. $5.1 billion in social benefit. $4.9 billion in health benefit.

La Trobe also studied community Australian Rules clubs in Victoria.

The researchers estimated that for every dollar spent running a club, at least $4.40 in social value was created.

That study was not about soccer. It was not done in Tasmania. I won't pretend the figure transfers directly.

But it tells us something.

Community clubs don't simply use up public resources.

They create value too.

So should the grounds be free?

That is a question I did not expect to be asking when I started reading council fee schedules.

Maybe not.

Grounds cost money. Somebody has to pay.

But George Town's schedule says its ground charges don't apply to its current sporting clubs.

Other councils have chosen very differently.

When a council puts its fees up the club has only so many places to find the money.

Sponsorship.

Fundraising.

The canteen.

Or registration fees.

And registration fees mean families.

So is community sport a user of council services that should contribute to the cost?

Or is it a community service worth investing in?

It can be both.

Tasmania's councils have drawn that line in very different places.

I looked at 17 of them and found six different models.

I'm not asking for every ground to cost the same.

I'm asking what principles should decide what a volunteer club pays to play on a publicly owned ground.

Because right now the answer depends on which side of a council boundary you happen to be standing.

And maybe the figure we should be looking for is not what a football ground costs.

Maybe it is what community sport is worth.