Hordes of fans poured through the entrances and into the merchandise store and concessions markets at the newly built Centreville Bank Stadium in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
It was a sunny Saturday afternoon, and Rhode Island FC was set to play a nationally televised match against Hartford Athletic. The sellout crowd was filled with parents, children and hard-core hometown supporters who sported the club’s blue and yellow jerseys and T-shirts.
With 10,500 seats, the venue, which opened in May, is one of the most expensive lower-tier soccer stadiums in U.S. history.
To build the stadium, Rhode Island officials approved a deal in which the state would pay $132 million over 30 years. But a sticking point was that the project must also include mixed-use development with hundreds of housing units, as well as retail stores, along the adjacent riverfront land.
Rhode Island FC is one of dozens of professional soccer clubs in the United States that have looked to build lavish soccer-specific stadiums — a wave taking hold in small and midsize cities. The projects aim to capitalize on the growing professional soccer market, and provide new revenues for club owners and excellent game-day experiences for fans. Often located downtown or on prime real estate, they are promoted as catalysts for local business and neighborhood revitalization.
But a New York Times review of U.S. professional soccer-specific stadium projects found that the mixed-use development components, particularly ones that include housing, are often delayed or, to date, are incomplete. And those projects, experts say, don’t always bring in the revenue and economic activity that are promised.
Officials could justify using public funding to help build a stadium, because they believe it could benefit the community in the way that a public park might, said Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor and stadium finance expert at Smith College in Massachusetts.
“But going around and suggesting that these things revivify local downtowns, or attract new investment to the economy, and grow employment and living standards,” he said, “the evidence is that it doesn’t happen.”
High-stakes investments
New high-priced soccer cathedrals for clubs in Major League Soccer, the top U.S. men’s professional league, have been built or are underway in large cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Miami. But the bulk of soccer-specific stadiums in the country have been built or planned for lower-tiered clubs in smaller cities.
At least 50 stadiums have been completed or are in the planning or development process for soccer clubs that compete in various tiers of the United Soccer League, the MLS development league, or in the top-tiered National Women’s Soccer League. Among those stadiums, more than two dozen were completed in 2020 or later or are currently being planned or developed.
As the number of stadiums being constructed has gone up, so has the price. For instance, Sacramento Republic FC — which, like Rhode Island FC, plays in the USL Championship — built its privately funded 11,000-seat stadium for just $3 million in 2014.
The club is now in the process of replacing it with a $175 million, 12,000-seat stadium in the city’s Railyards district.
Sports ownership groups view mixed-use development as an important tool to generate revenue that would help them chip away at the high price of buying a franchise, and many have turned to commercial assets recently to diversify their revenue streams, according to a 2024 report from the consulting firm Deloitte.
Such developments have been constructed around the stadiums of NFL franchises such as the Atlanta Falcons and the New England Patriots, and are a central part of the Washington Commanders’ $3.8 billion stadium project.
Owning a stadium and the surrounding mixed-use developments affects a club’s valuation, said Pete Giorgio, who leads Deloitte’s global and U.S. sports practice.
The exact amount, however, is hard to quantify, he continued, since there are so many different factors: the stadium’s size and age; whether the stadium is in the city center or on the periphery of the metro area; whether the venue can host concerts and other nonsporting events; and whether the group owns the stadium, the land it’s on and the entertainment district around it.
“Things get a little bit complicated in terms of how these things are set up,” Giorgio said. But, he added, “every team that is looking at renovating or rebuilding, or building a stadium or arena right now is absolutely looking to see if they can do a mixed-use development around it.”
The Rhode Island ownership group, headed by partners of the real estate development firm Fortuitous Partners, believed building a stadium with state-of-the-art amenities was critical to creating the best possible fan experience, said Dan Kroeber, a club founder.
Rhode Island FC hopes to rise into the top-tiered ranks on par with MLS after the USL launches a first-division league, planned for 2027-28, and an eventual promotion and relegation system in which successful lower-tier clubs can climb the ranks and losing teams fall down the ladder.
“This has always been about bringing sports to phenomenal, what we call, underserved, markets like Rhode Island,” said Brett M. Johnson, co-founder of Rhode Island FC. “But it all comes down to the facility.”
Challenges seeing it through
Jeff Buell is among those vying for a USL club and a high-priced stadium. His project’s investment group, led by Buell’s real estate firm, Sequence Development, has proposed a $150 million, 8,000-seat soccer stadium in downtown Albany, New York. (The group also includes Rhode Island FC investors.)
Buell pitched the stadium as part of a greater $600 million project that would build and renovate several new residential buildings totaling more than 1,000 units, and have more than 100,000 square feet of commercial space on 8 acres of underused land.
If Buell could obtain the land, $150 million in public funds and approval from the city, he said, the project would inject new life into a downtown that hasn’t fully recovered since people began to work remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The neighborhoods that are in and around the downtown desperately need some new energy,” Buell said. “We think that we can be a jumping-off point for that.”
But executing mixed-use development around the stadium could prove challenging.
At least 12 professional soccer-specific stadium projects that have been completed since 2000 have included mixed-use development with housing as part of the proposal. None have been fully realized, but five have been partially completed. Nineteen other projects with housing baked into their mixed-use development have been proposed or are undergoing construction. Many of those projects are in small or midsize cities such as Grand Rapids, Michigan; Des Moines, Iowa; and Rogers, Arkansas.
None of the 600,000 square feet designated for housing, retail, bars, restaurants and commercial space as part of the Colorado Rapids’ $183 million stadium project in Commerce City, Colorado, for instance, has yet been realized. The stadium opened in 2007.
The Rapids’ ownership group is still exploring mixed-use possibilities with city leaders, while evaluating its operations and the land around the stadium, Mike Neary, the group’s executive vice president of business operations and real estate, said in a statement.
There’s always an intention for developers and stadium owners to follow through on the mixed-use development portion of stadium projects, said Erin Talkington, managing director of RCLCO, a real estate consulting firm. But the results are mixed when it comes to whether that development actually materializes — or does so at the scope and time frame that city officials expect, she said.
Most professional sports team ownership groups don’t have much real estate experience, and are often forced to go back to the drawing board on the mixed-use development aspect of the project when it comes time to actually plan it, Talkington said.
The USL president, Paul McDonough, argues that clubs have learned how to turn development around their stadiums into a focal point of their city.
The Colorado Switchbacks, a USL Championship club, have completed the first phase of their plans to build apartments and retail around their 8,000-seat stadium, which opened in 2021 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The project has quadrupled the revenues of the club, which had struggled financially after debuting in 2015, McDonough said.
“Now they have a great value,” he said. “They are part of the community.”
Breathing new life into Pawtucket?
When Centreville Bank Stadium in Rhode Island is completed, a gravel lot beside it will be replaced by 250 apartment units and roughly 30,000 square feet of retail, including about 10 restaurants and shops, Kroeber said. A new pedestrian bridge will connect the site to two additional apartment buildings, which will total more than 300 housing units.
The stadium itself is on land that was contaminated by a decommissioned manufactured gas plant. Rhode Island Energy and Fortuitous Partners remediated the site to make way for the stadium project, Kroeber said.
The new development “brings life to the area,” said David Peart, Rhode Island FC’s president. “It’s not just people coming here for soccer and leaving — it’s folks coming here to live.”
Still, building lower-tier soccer stadiums on valuable urban real estate provides few economic benefits, said Zimbalist, the economics professor. Those stadiums are often used fewer than 50 times throughout the year between soccer games, concerts and high school tournaments — many of which don’t sell out and last only a few hours, he said.
“Are you going to want to build a restaurant next to that?” Zimbalist said. “Are you going to want to build a bar next to that? You’re going to want to build a hotel next to that?”
Such stadiums can yield similar economic returns to what a city may get from a Target department store, said Peter Boumgarden, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who studies stadium financing.
Kroeber said the Pawtucket stadium has hosted professional men’s and women’s rugby events and will eventually host a first-division USL women’s soccer team, concerts and athletic events held by local universities.
The vote to approve state funding to help pay for the stadium was narrowly decided in 2022, with Gov. Daniel McKee casting the tiebreaking vote.
Michael McNally, who was one of the five members of the state commerce board who voted against the stadium, said he doubted the mixed-use development would ever get built. But if the ownership group does complete it as originally envisioned without any additional state subsidies, McNally said he would concede that the project was “a great deal.”
Kroeber vowed that the mixed-use development portion would definitely happen, and said that the group is working on designs and getting the needed permits to break ground on the project. But there is a possibility that the club will seek additional public funding to complete it, he said.
“This is prime real estate that will become the destination of why people are coming to Pawtucket,” Kroeber said.
The benefits of having Rhode Island FC and the stadium in Pawtucket extend beyond economics, Mayor Donald Grebien said. It allows the city to remain a sports and entertainment hub after losing the Pawtucket Red Sox — the Boston Red Sox’s longtime Class AAA affiliate — to nearby Worcester, Massachusetts, in 2021.
The city chipped in $10 million in federal pandemic relief funding toward the stadium project, money that will be paid back through tax payments over 20 years.
“The community embraced the PawSox for many years and they are now embracing Rhode Island FC,” Grebien said. “There’s a self-esteem, if you will, and people have pride in having a sports team that they can associate with.”