Smaller fields, fewer sports facilities at new home of Turf City's football pitch operator
With almost every tenant at Turf City required to move out by Dec 31, the Cage will move to a new site at Dempsey, which is one-eighth the size of its current home.
One of the football pitches at The Cage Sports Park at Turf City. (Photo: The Cage)
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SINGAPORE: When sports facility The Cage opens in its new, smaller home in Dempsey next February, there will be no space for an 11-a-side football pitch.Â
Football pitch operator WWTBF, which runs The Cage at Turf City, will leave its current home at the end of the year and move to 10A Harding Road.
The new site is about 13,000 sq m – around one-eighth of its current premises at Turf City, which is just under 100,000 sq m.
All tenants at Turf City – bar an equestrian operator – are required to leave the Bukit Timah site by Dec 31.
WWTBF director Rajesh Mulani told CNA on Friday (Dec 22) that its most popular offering at Turf City is its 11-a-side pitch. Players on the full-sized pitch form the largest group of customers that the operator caters to.
But the new facility will only have smaller pitches, and no 11-a-side field.
"At Turf City we have built a proper sports park to include paintball, tennis, padel tennis, archery, basketball, indoor cricket, batting nets for cricket, baseball and softball and football – 11-a-side and five-a-side.
"At Dempsey, we will not have the space to set up all of that."
Their smaller home will only have seven-a-side and five-a-side football pitches, as well as padel tennis courts and cricket or baseball batting nets.
"At Turf City, we host about 100,000 man-hours of sports participation every month. At Dempsey, we will be happy with 20 to 30 man-hours of sport,” Mr Mulani said.
The new site at Dempsey will not be able to cater to “all our customers from Turf City”, he added.
"CRAZY EXPENSIVE"
“Building a new facility in the current climate is crazy expensive now,” Mr Mulani said.
“It is also painful for us to only be able to cater to a small percentage of our current customers. This creates customer service issues.”
He added that the new sports facility will have to "blend into the environment that is Dempsey".Â
The Dempsey area is filled with shops and restaurants, unlike Turf City where The Cage's neighbour is Rainforest Sports Hub.
Rainforest Sports Hub has been awarded a parcel of land near Haw Par Villa MRT station.
FOUR-YEAR TRANSITION
Only one tenant in Turf City will be allowed to stay beyond the Dec 31 deadline. Blue Dolphin Gallery, an equestrian operator, has been given a three-month temporary occupation licence due to delays in getting ready its new home at 8 Admiralty Road East.
Turf City is zoned for residential use, with plans for a new neighbourhood. Its tenants have been given two successive 18-month tenancy extensions up to Dec 31 to give them more time to firm up their transition plans.
“Since 2019, agencies have engaged tenants regularly on the need to vacate the site to facilitate redevelopment," said the Singapore Land Authority (SLA), Sport Singapore (SportSG) and Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) in a joint press release on Thursday.
As part of efforts to support affected tenants, the government made available more than 20 new sites through public tenders to provide additional relocation options for tenants.
The sites are located across Singapore, ranging in size from over 8,000 sq ft to 1.6 hectares. They support a variety of uses, such as childcare, sports, and mixed uses.
The joint release said SportSG has been working closely with relevant agencies to identify sites that can be progressively tendered out for sports use, adding that this would attract good proposals to “better engage communities through sport”.
"For example, WWTBF’s proposal envisaged the 10A Harding Road site as an engaging and vibrant multi-sports facility, with a line-up of regular sports programmes involving diverse communities," said the authorities.
To complement the strategies under the Sports Facilities Master Plan, SportSG aims to "increase the network of sport and play spaces beyond the provision of public sport facilities".
Mr Mulani said he hopes more parcels of land will be opened up for sports. WWTBF plans to bid for some of these sites, with the director saying that there is "good appetite for more sports offerings, especially 11-a-side amateur football".
"While we understand that land in Singapore is precious and the authorities have bigger plans for the space we currently operate at Turf City, it is a real shame to see the sports momentum we have built at Turf City come to an abrupt stop as we cannot cater to it," he added.
"We are only able to build a much smaller sports park at Dempsey."
