A GROUND NAMED FOR COUNTRY.

The suburb name tells you something important before the sport even begins. Woolloongabba derives from either woolloon-capemm, meaning “whirling water”, or from woolloon-gabba, meaning “fight talk place” — both translations carrying a certain rightness for a venue that has hosted more than a century of physical contest and civic argument. The Turrbal people are the Traditional Owners of Brisbane and have been the custodians of this area for many thousands of years. The ground they have never ceded, and the suburb whose name carries their language, is where Queensland’s AFL club has built its modern identity.

There is something fitting in the idea that the most contested sporting venue in Queensland sits on land whose very name may translate as a place of talking through conflict. The Brisbane Lions’ relationship with the Gabba is, at its core, a story about belonging — how an out-of-state sport planted itself in league territory, found a physical home, converted that home into a genuine fortress, and now faces the slow, government-mandated farewell that all sporting landmarks must eventually confront. The stadium question — where Brisbane will play its football after 2032 — is not merely a question of architecture or infrastructure. It is a question about what civic identity means in a city on the cusp of its most significant transformation since federation.

The permanent onchain namespace lions.queensland exists as one layer of that broader project: anchoring Brisbane’s AFL club to a persistent Queensland identity that transcends any single venue, any season, or any particular arrangement of concrete and steel. But to understand why that permanence matters, it is worth returning to the ground itself.

FROM CRICKET GROUND TO AFL STRONGHOLD.

The land on which the ground sits was first set aside for use as a cricket ground in 1895, and the first cricket match was held on the site on 19 December 1896, between Parliament and The Press. For most of the following century, the Brisbane Cricket Ground — its formal name, though rarely used — was primarily a cricket venue, sharing first-class cricket matches with the Brisbane Exhibition Ground until 1931, with the first international test played at the Gabba on 27 November 1931 between Australia and South Africa. The ground accumulated layers of sporting history well before Australian rules football arrived: rugby league, rugby union, baseball, cycling, pony racing, greyhound racing — over the years, the Gabba has hosted athletics, Australian rules football, baseball, concerts, cricket, cycling, rugby league, rugby union, Association football, and pony and greyhound racing.

Australian football’s connection to the ground predates the Lions by decades. The Queensland Football League, a precursor to AFL Queensland, played matches at the Gabba from 1905 to 1914, 1959 to 1971, and in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first VFL game at the venue came much later: the first VFL/AFL game at the Gabba was held on 28 June 1981, with Hawthorn hosting Essendon in front of 20,351 spectators.

The decisive transformation came in 1993. The last greyhound meeting was held at the Gabba on 5 February 1993, with work commencing shortly after to remove the greyhound track around the ground to accommodate the relocation of the Brisbane Bears from Carrara on the Gold Coast to the Gabba, renovating the Sir Gordon Chalk Building to house the Bears Social Club and change rooms, refurbishing the Clem Jones Stand, the construction of a new Western grandstand, and extending the playing surface to cater for Australian rules football. The work was largely completed by 11 April when the Bears hosted their first AFL game at the renovated venue against Melbourne in front of 12,821 spectators.

The Bears had struggled on the Gold Coast. The Bears started playing games at the Gabba in Brisbane in 1991, and by 1993 all their home games were played there. This move helped the club considerably, as more people joined as members and attended games. It was an early, concrete lesson: in Australian rules football, geography matters enormously. The code needed to be in a capital city, near the population, connected to public transport and the rhythms of urban life. The Brisbane Bears experimented with playing four matches at the Gabba in Brisbane in 1991, before moving all home matches to the venue ahead of the 1993 season.

THE MERGER AND THE GROUND THAT HELD IT TOGETHER.

When the Brisbane Bears and Fitzroy merged at the end of 1996, the Gabba became a kind of civic adhesive — the one fixed point in an otherwise complicated act of institutional consolidation. The Lions came into existence in 1996 when the AFL expansion club the Brisbane Bears, established in 1987, absorbed the AFL operations of one of the league’s foundation clubs, Fitzroy, established in Melbourne, Victoria in 1883. The merged club carried forward the identities of two very different institutions, from two very different cities, with two very different histories. What it did not have to negotiate was where it played. The club became the Brisbane Bears-Fitzroy Football Club, trading as Brisbane Lions, remained at the Gabba, and were coached by Bears coach John Northey.

The Brisbane Lions were officially launched on 1 November 1996, joining the national competition in 1997. In their first season, against considerable expectation, the Brisbane Lions in 1997 remain the only team in VFL/AFL history to have made the finals in their first season. The Gabba was already, in that single year, a home ground rather than a temporary arrangement.

The redevelopment that was underway since 1993 continued in stages. Between 1993 and 2005, the Gabba was redeveloped in six stages at a cost of A$128,000,000. The dimensions of the playing field are now 170.6 metres east-west by 149.9 metres north-south, to accommodate the playing of Australian rules football at elite level. The final stage arrived in 2005: the sixth and final stage of the $128 million redevelopment was completed in 2005, when a 24-bay grandstand replaced the old Brisbane Lions Social Club, to increase the stadium’s seating capacity to 42,000. An oval venue had been remade, in significant part, because an AFL club from a merged organisation needed a place to belong.

THE GABBATOIR: FORTRESS YEARS AND WHAT THEY MEAN.

Between 2001 and 2003, the Brisbane Lions won three consecutive AFL premierships — a feat not achieved by any club since the creation of the national competition. The Gabba was central to how that dynasty was built. Home advantage was pronounced, with the club’s fast-paced style suiting the ground’s dimensions and firm surface, contributing to a 15-2 regular-season home record across those premiership years. This period elevated the Gabba’s status in AFL circles, as Brisbane’s success drew record attendances exceeding 30,000 for multiple fixtures.

Then the lean years. After the dynasty collapsed and the club entered a prolonged rebuild, the Gabba’s symbolic power remained, even if the wins did not always follow. The fortress reconstituted itself again from 2019 onward, when a rebuilt Lions side began an ascent that would eventually produce further premierships in 2024 and 2025. From 2019, when the Lions made a dramatic rise up the ladder, until 2023, the Lions almost never lost at the “Gabbatoir”. In total they won 53 of 61 matches in that period, including 49 of 53 in the home and away portion of the season.

The term “Gabbatoir” — a portmanteau that compresses “Gabba” and “abattoir” into a single word of sporting dread — captures something real about how opposing clubs have experienced the venue during Brisbane’s peak years. The Gabba, often nicknamed the “Gabbatoir”, has been one of the clearest modern examples of home-ground advantage. During Brisbane’s rise in the early 2000s and again in the late 2010s and early 2020s, the Lions built extended winning streaks at the venue. The record attendance for an AFL match at the ground reflects the scale of that connection: the record crowd for an Australian rules football match at the Gabba is 37,473, between the Brisbane Lions and Richmond in the 2019 second qualifying final.

More recently, the fortress reputation has softened. The winning percentage dropped from 87 per cent between 2019 and 2023, to 64 per cent from 2024 onwards. Since the start of 2024, opponents have walked away with four premiership points more often than in previous years. What that data reflects is not a collapse of home ground advantage so much as a normalisation — the consequence of a club that has become so prominent that visiting sides can no longer arrive in Brisbane without serious preparation and genuine belief. When a team is widely dismissed, its home ground works in its favour through opponents’ complacency as much as through any physical quality of the oval. Success changes that equation.

THE GROUND AS TRAINING BASE: AN IMPERMANENT ARRANGEMENT.

For decades, the Lions’ relationship with the Gabba was not simply about match days. Between 1997 and 2022, the club trained out of the Gabba during the football season. The club’s administrative and indoor training facilities were also located in the stadium. This arrangement had practical complications. Due to the cricket season in the summer, which is during the off-season for the Lions, the club was required to train at alternative locations over the years, including the University of Queensland campus, Leyshon Park in Yeronga, Giffin Park in Coorparoo, Moreton Bay Central Sports Complex in Burpengary, and elsewhere, meaning the club lacked a dedicated and permanent home year-round.

This itinerant off-season arrangement — moving between suburban grounds as cricket reclaimed the Gabba each summer — was a structural weakness for a club aiming to build the kind of elite training environment that modern AFL demands. The Lions considered facilities on the northern corridor including the Sunshine Coast, Moreton and Brendale as permanent homes, but none were deemed suitable as AFL-level facilities. Consequently, the club sought to establish a permanent training and administrative base for the senior men’s team that could also host AFLW and reserves matches.

The solution arrived at Springfield, approximately 30 kilometres south-west of Brisbane. The facility has been the permanent training and administrative home of the Brisbane Lions since 2022. The cost of the Springfield facility was $82.1 million, with the Lions and the AFL contributing $10 million, Ipswich Council $12 million, Springfield Land Corporation $18 million, and the Queensland Government $15 million. The Brisbane Lions signed a 99-year lease on the facility. Its main playing field is named in honour of the club’s greatest captain: the Michael Voss Oval, named in honour of Michael Voss, who played a combined 289 games for the Brisbane Bears and Brisbane Lions.

The design incorporated themes from the Fitzroy Football Club. The main grandstand pays homage to the red brick main stand of Fitzroy’s old home ground, the Brunswick Street Oval, with its central double stair, red brick base, and low-pitch roof. Heritage is encoded into the built form — the merged club carrying both cities forward through architecture. The Gabba, meanwhile, remains the match-day home: the civic face the club presents to Brisbane on game day, even as the daily work of training and administration has migrated westward.

THE GRAND FINAL THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING.

In October 2020, something unprecedented happened at the Gabba. The venue was selected to host the 2020 AFL Grand Final, with the Melbourne Cricket Ground not capable of hosting any spectators due to the pandemic. The Gabba thus became the first stadium outside the state of Victoria to host a VFL/AFL Grand Final, which Richmond won against Geelong in front of 29,707 people — just under the venue’s temporary maximum capacity due to the pandemic.

The significance of that moment extended well beyond the immediate circumstances of a disrupted season. For a club whose very existence was predicated on proving that elite AFL could thrive outside Victoria, having the game’s premier event held at its home ground was a form of institutional validation stretching back to the Bears’ first tentative seasons on the Gold Coast, and to the difficult early years of the merged Lions. The Gabba had been good enough for the Grand Final. That fact altered, permanently, the cultural geography of the AFL.

In mid-2020, the Gabba received a $35 million refurbishment of the stadium’s media and corporate facilities, as well as entrances and spectator amenities. The work was completed in October that year, shortly before the venue hosted the 2020 AFL Grand Final. The renovations that made the Grand Final possible were, in a sense, also the last significant investment in a venue whose future was about to be fundamentally redirected.

THE OLYMPIC DISRUPTION: THE STADIUM QUESTION ARRIVES.

When Brisbane was awarded the 2032 Summer Olympics in 2021, the stadium question moved from the background of civic planning into its foreground. In 2021, when Brisbane was named preferred host of the 2032 Summer Olympics, plans were initially announced for a $1 billion reconstruction of the Gabba to serve as the main stadium. The reconstruction would expand its seating capacity to 50,000 and feature a new pedestrian plaza. By 2023, the projected cost had grown to $2.7 billion, which would be paid entirely by the state.

The cost escalation triggered years of political dispute, competing reviews, and eventually a complete reversal of approach. In March 2024, following an independent review launched by Queensland Premier Steven Miles and led by former Lord Mayor Graham Quirk, the Gabba project was scrapped in favour of refurbishing Lang Park and the Queensland Sport and Athletics Centre to host the ceremonies and athletics respectively. Then the Crisafulli government, having commissioned its own review, arrived at a different conclusion. The stadium development is part of the 2032 Delivery Plan, announced to the public on 25 March 2025 by the Crisafulli government.

Brisbane is set to have a new home ground from the 2033 season following the Queensland government’s announcement that the Gabba will be demolished and a 63,000-seat stadium built at inner-city Victoria Park. Premier David Crisafulli confirmed the new stadium would be the centrepiece of the 2032 Olympics and then be home to the Lions and cricket after the Games. The Gabba will continue to host AFL home games until then, before being demolished for residential development.

The scale of the new venue is substantially larger than what the Lions currently have. The Gabba currently holds 37,000 spectators for AFL games, with the Lions officially selling out nine of their 12 games in 2024. That sellout frequency matters for understanding why a larger venue was necessary rather than simply desirable. A club that is consistently selling out a 37,000-seat ground is a club whose civic footprint has outgrown its infrastructure. As the Lions CEO noted at the time of the announcement, “The Gabba has been a great home for the past 30 years, but the city has outgrown it, the Lions have outgrown it.”

The new venue at Victoria Park is being designed by a consortium of Australian and international architects. Cox Architecture, Hassell, and Azusa Sekkei have been selected to design Brisbane’s new Olympic Stadium in Victoria Park. Australian firms Cox and Hassell will partner with Japan’s Azusa Sekkei to deliver the 63,000-capacity stadium. The consortium brings significant stadium experience, including Perth’s Optus Stadium, Adelaide Oval’s redevelopment, and the 2006 upgrade of the MCG’s Northern Stand, while Azusa Sekkei has delivered more than 120 stadiums globally, including Tokyo’s Japan National Stadium.

The proposed site, however, carries its own layers of contested meaning. Victoria Park, known to Indigenous communities as Barrambin (meaning “windy place”), served for thousands of years as a gathering and living area for Aboriginal communities. Representatives of the Yagara Magandjin Aboriginal Corporation have warned of potential destruction of sites of spiritual, archaeological, and ecological importance, including possible ancestral burial grounds. Opposition groups are contesting the development. The planned location of the stadium has been challenged by opposition groups, with legal challenges ongoing. The stadium question, in this sense, is not merely a question about a football club’s future home. It opens onto deeper questions about what Brisbane remembers and what it is prepared to displace in the name of its Olympic ambitions.

The Brisbane Stadium is expected to break ground in 2026, with a target completion date of 2031. Following the Olympics, the new stadium will inherit the Gabba’s current tenants, including the Brisbane Lions of the Australian Football League, the Queensland Bulls in domestic cricket, and the Brisbane Heat of the Big Bash League and Women’s Big Bash League. Cricket Australia announced that the first test of the 2033–34 Ashes series would be held at the new stadium, as one of its first major sporting events following the Olympics and Paralympics.

THE GROUND CONSTRAINT AND WHAT COMES NEXT.

The Gabba’s physical limitations have always shaped the experience of watching football there. The development resulted in the grandstand structure overhanging Vulture and Stanley streets, which tightly constrain the stadium to the north and the south, as well as overhanging the East Brisbane State School in the east. This overhang complicated redevelopment plans and led to speculation that the streets would need to become tunnels in order to facilitate a larger stadium above. The stadium, in other words, had reached its outer edges. It could not grow because the suburb would not give way.

That physical constraint is one reason why the decision to relocate rather than rebuild carries a certain logic, whatever one thinks of the specific choice of Victoria Park. The alternative — attempting to build a 63,000-seat structure on a site hemmed in by streets and a school — would have required either tunnelling under inner-Brisbane suburbia or accepting a significantly smaller Olympic venue than competing proposals. Brisbane is a city that has historically underbuilt its public infrastructure; there is a reasonable argument that the new stadium is simply overdue.

The Lions’ current members have already exceeded the venue’s capacity to accommodate them. The new Brisbane Stadium is being designed with flexibility at its core, featuring a base capacity of around 63,000, expandable for major events, and a concert configuration for up to 70,000 spectators. The latest designs confirm several key elements of the stadium, including a field of play equivalent in size to the Melbourne Cricket Ground, ensuring the venue can accommodate both AFL and international cricket. The larger oval dimensions were chosen following comparisons with major venues including the MCG and Optus Stadium, with the added benefit of allowing for an athletics track during the Olympics.

What the Lions lose in the transition is harder to quantify. The Gabba has been their home ground since the very first game under the Lions name in 1997. The partnership has hosted over 400 Lions home games, cementing the Gabba’s role in establishing AFL viability in non-traditional markets. Three decades of match memories, of the particular acoustics of the western grandstand under lights, of Easter Thursday clashes with Collingwood drawing noise levels that the suburb’s residents could hear blocks away — none of that transfers automatically to a new venue. Home ground advantage, when it is real, is built across years of accumulated familiarity: the players who know every bounce of the surface, the members who know every sightline from their seat.

That intangible accumulation is what the club will have to rebuild in the 2030s, in a ground that will be larger, newer, better-connected, and entirely unfamiliar. Whether the Victoria Park stadium develops its own character and its own nickname — whether a new generation of AFL supporters creates something equivalent to “the Gabbatoir” at the new ground — will depend on performances and circumstance, not on planning decisions. Civic identity of that kind is not designed. It is earned, slowly, game by game.

PERMANENCE BEYOND ANY SINGLE GROUND.

What the stadium question ultimately illuminates is the distinction between a club’s physical location and its civic identity. The Brisbane Lions are not, at their core, a building in Woolloongabba. They are the expression, however imperfect and commercially complicated, of a sustained forty-year project to embed Australian rules football into a city that was not built for it. That project began on the Gold Coast, moved to Brisbane, survived a merger that nearly ended both clubs involved, won three consecutive premierships to announce itself as a national force, endured a decade of rebuilding, and has re-emerged in the 2020s as arguably the competition’s dominant club.

The venue changes. The ambition, the membership, the culture, the relationship with Queensland — these persist. It is in that spirit that a permanent civic namespace like lions.queensland carries meaning: not as a commercial product, but as an onchain address for an institution whose identity is tied to place — to Queensland, to Meanjin, to the broader project of making a southern code genuinely northern — in ways that outlast any particular arrangement of grandstands and floodlights.

The Gabba will be demolished after 2032. The Gabba will still host matches right up until the Olympics. After 2032, the plan is to decommission — and eventually demolish — the old stadium. The Woolloongabba site will become a residential neighbourhood, the suburb’s name preserved while the ground that made it famous is erased. Future Brisbane residents will live on the land that once held the Gabbatoir, will walk to the Cross River Rail station underneath what was the western grandstand, and may not know, or may care deeply, what stood there before them. Memory works that way in cities: accreting, losing, recovering.

For the Brisbane Lions, the years between now and 2033 are the final chapter of a specific and irreplaceable story — the story of a club that built itself into a Queensland institution on a ground named, in a language older than the sport itself, for talk and contest and the movement of water. Whatever comes next at Victoria Park, that chapter will have been definitive.