From Socceroos and Pele to a drug den. Now this stadium has been reborn

There is no better metaphor for the rise, fall and subsequent evolution of what was once Australia’s leading soccer club than the ground it calls home, which after more than a decade in disrepair has been given a new lease on life.

For nearly 20 years, St George Stadium – or Barton Park – was simply the place to be if you were a soccer fan in Sydney. Built on a former dump site within a defensive clearance of one of the runways at Sydney airport, by the Hungarian immigrants who founded the St George-Budapest club and turned them into one of the country’s leading suppliers of Socceroos and Matildas, it opened with the first game of the second season of the National Soccer League in 1978. George Harris and Peter Ollerton, the captains of St George and South Melbourne Hellas respectively, made a suitably grand entrance to the…