Sydney FC captain Alex Brosque is confident his club can avoid the pitfalls that have befallen their local A-League rivals after leaving a formidable home fortress.
The Sky Blues and Western Sydney Wanderers clash on Saturday in the first football match to be played at the SCG in in just over 33 years.
For their next three campaigns while their Moore Park stadium is being rebuilt, Sydney will divide their home games between the SCG, Leichhardt Oval and Jubilee Oval.
They will find themselves in a identical situation to Wanderers, who have played almost all of their home games over the past two seasons at the ANZ and Spotless Stadiums.
Wanderers are scheduled for a 2019-20 move into the Western Sydney Stadium to be built at their old base in Parramatta, where the club enjoyed enormous success in their early years.
After finishing second on the ladder in 2015-16, when only once did they draw a home crowd of under 10,000, the Wanderers numbers on and off the pitch have fallen sharply.
They amassed 26 points from 13 home games in 2015-16, but finished with 19 in each of the last two campaigns, playing a 14th home match in 2016-17.
Wanderers dropped to sixth in 2016-17 and seventh last season, playing in front of four and five sub-10,000 home crowds in those respective campaigns.
Brosque agreed playing home games away from a familiar venue could adversely affect a team's mindset.
"I think it can if you allow it to," Brosque said.
"If you look at the Wanderers they went from a stadium that was perfect for football and it was that stadium that really started to slowly grab the people and then the atmosphere happened.
"Then all of a sudden they went from that into an 80,0000 seat stadium at ANZ, or even Spotless which is an AFL ground, and it just didn't have the same feel.
"I think that's a reason why their crowds may have dropped off, I think a lot changed for them.
"But from our point of view, we're going into smaller boutique stadiums, Leichhardt Oval, Kogarah (Jubilee).
"Only the bigger games, your derbies and Melbourne Victory games will be played at the SCG, which we're hoping to sellout.
"If we embrace it and if we get all our members across Sydney coming with us wherever we go, then we can turn this into something good."
Australian Associated Press
