This is a shopping scheme in disguise

Malta’s new push to commercialise sports facilities is being sold as a practical fix: clubs need money, public funds are limited, so let clubs earn income on-site. What could be more reasonable?

But the detail tells a different story. This is Joseph Muscat’s not-so-secret diabolical plan of making easy money. This is not simply about helping clubs survive. It is about changing what sports land is actually meant for. And losing precious land spaces in the process.

The suggested policy creates a framework for commercial development inside sports facilities. This means offices, retail units, catering outlets operating at any time of day, language schools, childcare centres, and even large-scale retail, including supermarkets and shopping malls.

It also formalises a proportion: at least 60% of the floorspace must remain sports and sports-related use, while up to 40% may be commercialised.

Forty per cent is a hefty chunk, especially when the commercial side is the part that pays the bills and attracts investors.

Then there is time. These arrangements can be locked in for up to 65 years. That is a multi-decade reshaping of community land, long enough for one generation to build it and the next to inherit it as ‘normal’.

With commercial property inside sports sites, the ‘problem’ is being framed as follows: clubs cannot survive within normal planning rules, and sport needs a commercial engine to fund it.

That framing matters because once the ‘problem’ becomes a lack of revenue, the policy’s success is judged in turnover, job creation, and financial projections, things that look very good on paper and photograph as well as at press conferences.

The reality is that a country does not become healthier because it has more gyms in its marketing brochures. It becomes healthier when ordinary people can actually use them, and without paying hefty fees.

The most striking absence in the policy is not what it permits but what it does not firmly protect. The government (in reality, Muscat) proposal does not provide any clear, unavoidable guarantee that public access will remain affordable and practical. There is no strong duty to preserve low-cost community hours. No explicit shield against pricing models that quietly push out the very people sport is meant to serve.

This is how public goods are often lost in modern life: not with a sign saying ‘closed’, but with a price list that makes you feel the place was never meant for you in the first place.

Malta is the most densely populated EU member state and has the highest proportion of land covered by artificial surfaces.

Forest cover is approximately 1%. Meanwhile, adult obesity affects roughly one-third of the population.

In that context, accessible sport should not be a luxury. It is public health infrastructure. It is as essential, in its own way, as a clinic.

Turning sports land into a commercial platform without ring-fencing affordability is like building a water tap and then charging people per cup in the middle of a heatwave.

Commercial development does not arrive quietly- Arnold Cassola

And what about neighbouring residents? They are treated as an ‘impact’, as passive collateral damage, not as a lived reality.

We know through experience that commercial development does not arrive quietly. It arrives with delivery vans, early starts, late finishes, extra lighting, louder evenings, more traffic, more parking pressure.

Even if some uses are restricted, the policy explicitly anticipates increased parking beyond what planning would normally require. That is a signal in itself: this is not just sport continuing as before; it is the intensification of the misery of nearby residents.

For neighbours, the question is whether their community becomes a place people live in, or a place people pass through just to spend their money. Imagine the chaos in the heart of Ħamrun or Mosta, with the commercialised Mile End and Mosta stadia. Residents can say bye-bye to peaceful living.

When government language speaks vaguely about “safeguarding neighbouring communities”, revamping and regenerating, it is the beginning of the end.

This government policy direction also allows touching ODZ land. In a small country with intense land pressure, ‘last resort’ is one of those phrases that can melt under heat.

Once the exception exists, it becomes a template. And once the template exists, it becomes routine.

The danger is that the national conversation shifts: ODZ starts to look like a reserve tank for projects that struggle to fit within normal limits. A recipe for disaster.

And finally. Who will benefit from all this? The beneficiaries are easy to identify; clubs with valuable sites gain a path to monetise land over decades. Third-party operators gain commercial opportunities wrapped in the legitimacy of sport. The state gains a narrative of ‘sustainability’ and investment without admitting that it is, functionally, enabling long-term commercial use of what is supposed to be public land.

And who loses out? This is clear too: the family priced out, young people edged away, neighbours who live with intensified disruption, and a country already struggling with overbuilding, limited green cover, and a public health burden linked to inactivity.

Ironically, Muscat’s diabolical plan is being driven by a government that presents itself in social-democratic terms: a politics that speaks of people, fairness, and shared opportunity.

A genuine people-first approach would treat sports facilities as a public good. Instead, the policy normalises an older idea: that public life must be subsidised by commercial life, and that the way to fund a community space is to attach a profit-making machine to it.

If you build a house and then rent out nearly half of it to a business, you do not simply ‘support’ the household. Over time, the household learns to live around the tenant.

The question Malta must answer is simple: are sports facilities primarily places for people to move, gather, and live healthier lives, or are they becoming prime sites where sport is the justification and commerce is the destination?

With the Muscat-Abela philosophy, the answer is self-evident. Quick profit for the few is the mantra… and may all others eat cake.

Arnold Cassola is leader of Momentum.