COMMENT: Sports Hub’s false starts heading towards a nightmare
By P N Balji
(Sports Hub file photo)
The Sports Hub is playing the oldest trick in the crisis playbook. Its latest spin is that it attracted 3.5 million people to visit the $1.33 billion infrastructural wonder last year.
To add spice to the publicity stunt, there was even a quote from somebody who is not directly involved in running the complex at Kallang. Sport Singapore’s supremo, Lim Teck Yin, said, “This is encouraging and bodes well for future developments.”
On the contrary, the future does not look good for the Sports Hub, what with key staff leaving, the calendar of big events looking dismal, and tiffs surfacing with event organisers who find the management trying to milk them for better deals.
And the appointment of a new CEO, Manu Sawhney five months ago does not seem to have helped. A big embarrassment came in September when the new leadership decided to renegotiate a deal with Mindef after both sides had shaken hands informally on an agreement to hold this year’s National Day Parade at the National Stadium.
Apparently, they wanted a better money deal. A source close to the negotiations said, “There was a gentleman’s agreement on allowing the stadium to be the venue for the Parade with agreed amounts for compensation for the additional days requested. “The managing director at that time, Mark Collins, was in the forefront of negotiations with Mindef and had already reached an agreement with the NDP organising committee before the appointment of Sawhney.” In the end, the new CEO had no choice but to accept the old deal, said the source.
Two other deals – the Merlion Cup and the Asia Masters Athletics Championships – collapsed, again over money matters. Even before these false starts, another embarrassment had hit the headlines. The people behind the pride of Kallang forgot what must have been the most basic ingredient for a stadium – grass.
(Workers maintain the pitch after a soccer training by Brazil’s national team ahead of their friendly soccer match against Japan in Singapore October 13, 2014. Photo: Reuters)
It was not for want of trying. A 15-month search that examined 20 types of grass ended in the $800,000 Desso GrassMaster field. But the experts forgot one dictum: What is nice-looking and cool may not be practical. The stadium’s roof design, which does not allow light over the full pitch, prevented the grass from taking root. The result: Red faces all over as the Brazil national squad and Italian club Juventus lambasted the state of the pitch after they played matches there in 2014.
In May 2015, the Sports Hub tried another solution to its pitch woes, installing a brand new pitch just before the 28th SEA Games. The Eclipse Stabilised Turf, supplied by Australia-based HG Sports Turf was laid on top of the Desso GrassMaster. HG Sports Turf will supply the turf for the next three years.
The short footnote to this laundry list of woes is that the Sports Hub is plagued by issues of leadership and a business model that is unsustainable.
The Sports Hub is run on a complicated model of ownership with too many fingers in the leadership pie. There are four equity partners – and all are foreigners – with Singapore’s Pico having a minor stake.
The late elder statesman Lee Kuan Yew, the man who has the long vision to spot a brewing storm, highlighted the potential leadership challenges during a briefing he was given in 2007. He is said to have told the head honchos: Choose the right partner as the relationship will be for 25 years. Recent events have shown how prescient Lee’s words were.
The bigger problem is whether the Sports Hub is pricing itself out of the market. The issues with the three problematic deals clearly show that there is a need to rethink its pricing structure.
In 2000, PSA lost an important foothold when container line Maersk Sealand moved its transhipment hub from Singapore to Johor. PSA’s chairman at that time, Yeo Ning Hong, was cocksure that his port’s connectivity, and not cost, was the deal breaker.
Similarly, STB’s insistence on not giving good deals to movie makers to film in Singapore sounded the death knell of that industry.
Now the Sports Hub is repeating the bungles of the past; it has muddled along for too long, just like how the SMRT operated in a dark tunnel with no one, neither the government nor the board of directors, shining a light on its impending nightmare.
Only a political intervention will stop another Singapore pride from falling off the rails.
P N Balji is a veteran Singaporean journalist who is the former chief editor of TODAY newspaper, and a media consultant. The views expressed are his own.
