Kings Reserve negotiated and handed over, behind closed doors

In late 2020 the West Torrens Council passed a motion to provide ‘its in principle support for the relocation of the Adelaide Football Club to Thebarton Oval’. The motion made no mention of Kings Reserve.

In late August 2022, the Adelaide Football Club announced that they had selected Thebarton Oval as the preferred site for their new training facility and corporate headquarters, stating that it was a very large parcel of land located in the inner western suburbs that would enable them to not only build an oval the size of Adelaide Oval but also a second oval the size of the MCG.

The announcement came after nearly two years of negotiations between the City of West Torrens and the Adelaide Football Club, all held behind closed doors and hidden from the public in confidential meetings. Following the announcement, and having already confidentially sought ministerial exemption to proceed while in a council election caretaker period, the Council began a 28-day public consultation period on a proposed 42-year lease of both Thebarton Oval and Kings Reserve to the Adelaide Football Club. 

The public consultation material did not contain any illustrated plans or images of the proposed development and instead focused on wordy lease terms containing jargon and technical terminology. The Precinct which had previously been referred to in the 2017/2018 public consultation as the ‘Kings Reserve’ Precinct was now being referred to as the ‘Thebarton Oval Precinct’ and the extent to which the second oval was to consume almost all the space on Kings Reserve and the substantial deviation from the 2018 Masterplan were not made clear.

A concept image produced by the Adelaide Football Club that was released to the media but not included in the Council’s public consultation material. The image has been modified in this report to highlight the approximate proposed lease area and to identify the location of Thebarton Oval and Kings Reserve.