WSJ: Inside the NFL’s $5 Billion Bet in Los Angeles
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[www.wsj.com]
By Andrew Beaton
Updated Sept. 13, 2019 10:05 am ET
Inglewood, Calif.
Have you ever faced the prospect of spending $1 billion, maybe $2 billion on something—and then decided to shell out $5 billion instead?
That is precisely what L.A. Rams owner Stan Kroenke is doing with Los Angeles Stadium at Hollywood Park, the extravagant attempt to create a West Coast shrine for the NFL that is under construction here.
There’s a big cost to building a state-of-the-art football stadium these days, and this one dwarfs all others. The new L.A. stadium isn’t just the most expensive in the U.S., and perhaps the world. It’s costing more than double the next priciest NFL stadium, and far more than the industry standard. The estimated cost for the Raiders’ new stadium in Las Vegas, for example, is under $2 billion.
And every dollar spent here has gone toward tackling one of the toughest problems in American sports: making professional football work in Los Angeles.
“You have to go back to the history of: How do you solve the NFL in Los Angeles?” said Kevin Demoff, the Rams’ chief operating officer. “It was always predicated on getting the right location, the right stadium, the right teams and the right development.”
At this time next year, the first stages of this sprawling project will be complete and two teams will call the new stadium home. Kroenke’s Rams will move in from The Coliseum, while the Chargers will move from their temporary home in a soccer-stadium-turned-football-bandbox.
A recent tour of the stadium and interviews with executives show the broader ambition of the project. Kroenke is spending lavishly to create a building they felt could exist only in Los Angeles, and is already set to host events like the Super Bowl in 2022, the college football championship in 2023 and the Olympics in 2028.
The complex is far larger than just a stadium, and the approximately $5 billion spent on the stadium may wind up being less than half the total cost. When the plot is fully developed, the total expenditure could exceed $10 billion, people familiar with the matter said. It isn’t just the largest sports complex around, it’s one of the largest privately financed projects in the entire country.
The breadth of the project is captured by the makeshift village that has been constructed to carry out a vision that’s far bigger than a home for some football games. Inside the 298 acres, there will be residences, a hotel, retail space, offices, a lake and more than 20 acres of public park. Temporary structures currently litter the grounds—they had to build a makeshift city in order to build this miniature city.
The primary hub is actually three separate spaces. There’s the stadium itself, which will seat 70,240 with the potential to expand to more than 100,000 for major events. Nearby, there’s also a 6,000-seat performance venue. In between, there’s a 2.5 acre plaza.
All three will be covered by a translucent plastic roof, like the one at the Minnesota Vikings’ U.S. Bank Stadium. The roof, which will angle downward from the stadium, over the plaza and to the theater, will be one of the final pieces to go up. Unlike U.S. Bank Stadium, it isn’t closed off by walls. The goal was a distinctly L.A. indoor-outdoor stadium hybrid.
And the sight of all of this going up is striking to anybody even vaguely familiar with the NFL’s blundering history here.
From 1995 through 2015, there wasn’t an NFL team in Los Angeles. The Rams and Raiders both left after the 1994 season, creating a jarring vacuum. While the country’s richest sports league placed teams in cities like Jacksonville, it didn’t have one in the country’s second-most-populous city. There was no shortage of proposed sites—in City of Industry, Irwindale, Carson, downtown, even Anaheim—but nothing came of them. People began to question whether professional football was legitimately viable here.
But there was one spot the league always coveted, and the Rams’ move was approved because of their ability to maneuver for it and their vision there. That location was just a few miles from Los Angeles International Airport, in Inglewood across the street from the Forum. Kroenke, whose background is in real estate, purchased the first 60 acres between the Forum and Hollywood Park in 2014. That land was later merged with the land from the closed racetrack.
It was a speculation that paid off two years later: the Rams’ proposal was approved in 2016, and the Chargers soon followed as part of the deal. They came up with broad plans for their giant tract of land, and that began with an expensive undertaking: digging 100 feet into the ground.
“It created challenges just in terms of moving dirt,” said Jason Gannon, the project’s managing director.
The proximity to LAX had two distinct effects on the stadium’s design. It meant that they obsessed over the optics and not just how the complex would look like from the inside or ground level, but also from up above for the nearly 200,000 passengers who fly in and out of the airport every day. It also meant they had to sink the stadium deep underground to avoid interfering with the nearby air traffic.
They hauled out eight million cubic yards of earth, creating a bathtub of sorts for the stadium to settle into. The designers say this makes it easier for most fans to enter and exit. It’s possible to be as high as the stadium’s fourth or fifth level, out of eight, before being above ground.
The experience inside the stadium has a simple premise. Imagine a rooftop bar with some football going on. The concourses on the inside are designed to allow people to move freely throughout, while they enjoy the open air and sightlines into the stadium and the 70,000 square foot video board that’s as long as the field.
“If you close your eyes and saw the stadium you’d say: It has to be in Los Angeles,” Demoff says. “This couldn’t be something you’d envision anywhere else.”
Outside the stadium, there are currently vast and largely empty plots of land. But these are perhaps more important than the stadium itself. The Rams and the NFL knew for this project to make any sort of financial sense, it had to be operational year round and not just on Sundays.
Throughout the design process, that was the parallel path they had to balance. The stadium was only part of the campus. At every step, they had to consider how it would work in tandem with the office buildings, retail space and more that will eventually inhabit the adjoining land.
They already have at least one notable tenant there: the NFL, which will move NFL Media and the NFL Network headquarters there in 2021.
“This certainly could have succeeded without a stadium,” Demoff said. “I don’t know if the stadium could have succeeded without the project.”
By Andrew Beaton
Updated Sept. 13, 2019 10:05 am ET
Inglewood, Calif.
Have you ever faced the prospect of spending $1 billion, maybe $2 billion on something—and then decided to shell out $5 billion instead?
That is precisely what L.A. Rams owner Stan Kroenke is doing with Los Angeles Stadium at Hollywood Park, the extravagant attempt to create a West Coast shrine for the NFL that is under construction here.
There’s a big cost to building a state-of-the-art football stadium these days, and this one dwarfs all others. The new L.A. stadium isn’t just the most expensive in the U.S., and perhaps the world. It’s costing more than double the next priciest NFL stadium, and far more than the industry standard. The estimated cost for the Raiders’ new stadium in Las Vegas, for example, is under $2 billion.
And every dollar spent here has gone toward tackling one of the toughest problems in American sports: making professional football work in Los Angeles.
“You have to go back to the history of: How do you solve the NFL in Los Angeles?” said Kevin Demoff, the Rams’ chief operating officer. “It was always predicated on getting the right location, the right stadium, the right teams and the right development.”
At this time next year, the first stages of this sprawling project will be complete and two teams will call the new stadium home. Kroenke’s Rams will move in from The Coliseum, while the Chargers will move from their temporary home in a soccer-stadium-turned-football-bandbox.
A recent tour of the stadium and interviews with executives show the broader ambition of the project. Kroenke is spending lavishly to create a building they felt could exist only in Los Angeles, and is already set to host events like the Super Bowl in 2022, the college football championship in 2023 and the Olympics in 2028.
The complex is far larger than just a stadium, and the approximately $5 billion spent on the stadium may wind up being less than half the total cost. When the plot is fully developed, the total expenditure could exceed $10 billion, people familiar with the matter said. It isn’t just the largest sports complex around, it’s one of the largest privately financed projects in the entire country.
The breadth of the project is captured by the makeshift village that has been constructed to carry out a vision that’s far bigger than a home for some football games. Inside the 298 acres, there will be residences, a hotel, retail space, offices, a lake and more than 20 acres of public park. Temporary structures currently litter the grounds—they had to build a makeshift city in order to build this miniature city.
The primary hub is actually three separate spaces. There’s the stadium itself, which will seat 70,240 with the potential to expand to more than 100,000 for major events. Nearby, there’s also a 6,000-seat performance venue. In between, there’s a 2.5 acre plaza.
All three will be covered by a translucent plastic roof, like the one at the Minnesota Vikings’ U.S. Bank Stadium. The roof, which will angle downward from the stadium, over the plaza and to the theater, will be one of the final pieces to go up. Unlike U.S. Bank Stadium, it isn’t closed off by walls. The goal was a distinctly L.A. indoor-outdoor stadium hybrid.
And the sight of all of this going up is striking to anybody even vaguely familiar with the NFL’s blundering history here.
From 1995 through 2015, there wasn’t an NFL team in Los Angeles. The Rams and Raiders both left after the 1994 season, creating a jarring vacuum. While the country’s richest sports league placed teams in cities like Jacksonville, it didn’t have one in the country’s second-most-populous city. There was no shortage of proposed sites—in City of Industry, Irwindale, Carson, downtown, even Anaheim—but nothing came of them. People began to question whether professional football was legitimately viable here.
But there was one spot the league always coveted, and the Rams’ move was approved because of their ability to maneuver for it and their vision there. That location was just a few miles from Los Angeles International Airport, in Inglewood across the street from the Forum. Kroenke, whose background is in real estate, purchased the first 60 acres between the Forum and Hollywood Park in 2014. That land was later merged with the land from the closed racetrack.
It was a speculation that paid off two years later: the Rams’ proposal was approved in 2016, and the Chargers soon followed as part of the deal. They came up with broad plans for their giant tract of land, and that began with an expensive undertaking: digging 100 feet into the ground.
“It created challenges just in terms of moving dirt,” said Jason Gannon, the project’s managing director.
The proximity to LAX had two distinct effects on the stadium’s design. It meant that they obsessed over the optics and not just how the complex would look like from the inside or ground level, but also from up above for the nearly 200,000 passengers who fly in and out of the airport every day. It also meant they had to sink the stadium deep underground to avoid interfering with the nearby air traffic.
They hauled out eight million cubic yards of earth, creating a bathtub of sorts for the stadium to settle into. The designers say this makes it easier for most fans to enter and exit. It’s possible to be as high as the stadium’s fourth or fifth level, out of eight, before being above ground.
The experience inside the stadium has a simple premise. Imagine a rooftop bar with some football going on. The concourses on the inside are designed to allow people to move freely throughout, while they enjoy the open air and sightlines into the stadium and the 70,000 square foot video board that’s as long as the field.
“If you close your eyes and saw the stadium you’d say: It has to be in Los Angeles,” Demoff says. “This couldn’t be something you’d envision anywhere else.”
Outside the stadium, there are currently vast and largely empty plots of land. But these are perhaps more important than the stadium itself. The Rams and the NFL knew for this project to make any sort of financial sense, it had to be operational year round and not just on Sundays.
Throughout the design process, that was the parallel path they had to balance. The stadium was only part of the campus. At every step, they had to consider how it would work in tandem with the office buildings, retail space and more that will eventually inhabit the adjoining land.
They already have at least one notable tenant there: the NFL, which will move NFL Media and the NFL Network headquarters there in 2021.
“This certainly could have succeeded without a stadium,” Demoff said. “I don’t know if the stadium could have succeeded without the project.”
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