How Ten Teams Share A Limited Pool Of Venues

A league that adds teams does not automatically gain stadiums. Venue capacity is the constraint that expansion runs into first, and it is managed by sharing rather than by building.

Not every franchise city has a suitable ground

A tournament-standard venue needs floodlights, drainage, broadcast positions, media facilities and crowd capacity, and in many cities only one ground qualifies.

New franchises are therefore placed where a qualifying stadium already exists, or they adopt a nearby city's ground while their own is upgraded over several seasons.

Where two teams end up sharing a region, the schedule must separate their home fixtures, since the ground cannot prepare strips for both simultaneously.

Secondary home venues spread the load

Franchises increasingly designate a second home ground, splitting their home fixtures between two cities. This halves the wear on each square and widens the commercial reach.

The trade-off is a diluted home advantage and a second full operational setup, including ticketing, stewarding and hospitality relationships in a city the club does not live in.

Clubs generally accept it because the alternative is a fixture list constrained by one square's recovery time, which limits how many home matches they can be given.

Ground availability is negotiated with owners each season

Most stadiums are owned by state or regional associations rather than the franchises, and their own domestic fixtures, maintenance work and other events compete for the same dates.

Negotiations therefore begin long before the fixture list, and a franchise whose ground is under redevelopment may lose home matches for a whole season.

Renovation is usually scheduled for the league's off-season, but overruns are common and the league keeps alternative venues identified for each home ground.

Neutral venues absorb the overflow

When a home ground is unavailable, a fixture moves to a neutral site, which means rebuilding ticketing, local sponsorship and stewarding for a one-off match.

Leagues try to group such displaced fixtures at a single venue rather than scattering them, so that one operational deployment covers several matches.

Displaced fixtures are also scheduled early in the season where possible, since a neutral-venue match late in a playoff race attracts stronger objections from clubs.

Playoffs are separated from home venue logic entirely

Knockout matches are awarded to venues in advance on operational and commercial grounds, without reference to which teams qualify, so no team plays a knockout at home by right.

This removes a scheduling problem that would otherwise be unsolvable, since a home knockout would need a venue held on standby in every franchise city.

It also concentrates the highest-value matches at the grounds with the best drainage, capacity and broadcast infrastructure, which is the outcome the league wants anyway.