That's irrelevant now the club has commenced the $15 million redevelopment of its Arden Street home, which will feature state-of-the-art training facilities, a community gymnasium and a life and learning centre.
Football, government and charity identities visited the site on Tuesday morning to celebrate the turning of the first sod and North chairman James Brayshaw declared it was "long overdue".
"Our club hasn't had the right amount of facilities and professionalism to be able to compete at the top level," he said.
"It is time we gave them what they need and in a year's time the facilities here will be as good as any."
Brayshaw said that an adequate facility was central to luring players while the location was a symbol of the club's history and commitment to a future in Melbourne.
"If you're going to take a kid in the first round [of the draft], in three, four or five years' time; if we didn't do this, their agents and probably parents are going to come to Arden Street and say, 'Why would I bring the kid here to play for the next 10 years when he could go somewhere where he's going to be properly looked after?'," he said.
"We've always said that we've looked after them properly, and I think we have, but ... it was really important to give our players every opportunity to be as good, if not better, than everyone else.
"I thought it was really important that we were based right here in the middle of North Melbourne. There was talk about going to far-reaching places and making a new home out there, but Arden Street's always been the home of the Kangaroos, right back to the old Shinboner days in the '30s."
Captain Brent Harvey is one of many who thought the day would never come.
He saw construction plans soon after joining the Roos at the end of 1995; but as Brayshaw pointed out, the wait has been even longer for club great Glenn Archer and dual premiership coach Denis Pagan.
"Speaking to Brady Rawlings, when he first got drafted [in 1998] they put it on the table and said they were going to do it next year," Harvey added. "It's a long time coming but it's fantastic to finally get some work done.
"It's all starting to happen and it's going t be really exciting times the next couple of years."
Like many of his past and present teammates, Harvey has accepted his surroundings and puts stronger emphasis on the calibre of people joining the club.
"We've never had anything different," he said."[But] you do look it and think, 'It would be good to have a great facility like that' but at the end of the day it's the people we bring into the footy club," he said.
"That's the most important thing.
"We've got 17 and 18-year-old boys walking into our footy club now who are going to go from this to that – a $15 million facility, it's fantastic. I feel a little bit sorry for blokes like Glenn Archer, who played here for so long.
"Hopefully Adam Simpson has a couple more years left in him and he gets one or two years out of it."
The redevelopment is expected to be completed by the end of the year.
