Related's Bruce Beal says the stadium test is what happens without a game

Speaking Tuesday at Sportico's Invest New York, Bruce Beal Jr. pushed back on a common stadium assumption: "The fallacy sometimes is if you build a stadium, everything around it will [automatically] get better." The president and partner of Related Companies, the developer founded by Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross, argued that the next wave of venues has to anchor neighborhoods that thrive all year, with housing, restaurants, retail and other amenities that serve the broader community.

Sharing the stage was Pat Ryan Jr., CEO of Ryan Sports Development, who oversaw Northwestern University's $870 million New Ryan Field, a 35,000-seat stadium in Evanston, Ill. Ryan told the audience that nearly every project is now priced in billions, according to Sportico's Daniel Libit, who covered the session. That leaves the owner who is paying for one of these projects with a plain question. Who on the team's side has actually done this before?

Apartments before the first match at Willets Point

Related is testing Beal's idea in Queens. With Sterling Equities, it is redeveloping Willets Point, where New York City FC's privately financed, 25,000-seat Etihad Park is scheduled to open in 2027. The surrounding plan calls for 2,500 affordable apartments, and 880 of them opened earlier this year. By simple arithmetic on those figures, roughly a third of the planned housing was occupied before the stadium hosted a single game.

That order is deliberate. Beal said the aim is for residents to see the soccer stadium as one part of a bigger neighborhood change, not the only reason the money showed up. He compared the race among venues to the "amenity wars" of residential real estate, a business Related knows well, while arguing that the stakes for stadiums run well past luxury suites.

The same model is running in California. Related is developing a 240-acre mixed-use district next to the San Francisco 49ers' Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, and the long-running project reached a milestone in April 2025 when a 22-story, 508-unit apartment tower opened. Taken together, the two projects suggest a model in which the stadium is one part of a wider district plan rather than the whole investment.

For a team's operations and technology leaders, the district model suggests the venue's back-of-house decisions now have to work for a neighborhood that is busy on ordinary days too. Loading, access control, networks and parking shared with residents and retail are decisions made years before opening, and they're hard to change later.

Most owner teams are building for the first time

The pipeline is about to test a lot of front offices. Stadium Tech Report reviewed publicly announced projects and found roughly 20 to 27 new North American stadiums, each with 10,000 or more seats, that could open between 2027 and 2030. STR calls that range a market signal, not a forecast, because financing, approvals and schedules can move projects into or out of the window. For context, it cites a 2023 Realogic analysis, drawing on Hunden Partners, that counted 95 new major-league venues across the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and MLS since 1999, or about four a year.

STR then modeled what that pace means for one person. At four new venues a year, an executive with a 25-year career has about a 46% chance of being at an organization during at least one new build. At six a year, that rises to about 63%. Even at the higher rate, roughly 60% of executives who get a build in the model get only one.

The outlet also checked who is actually in the room. It reviewed 69 owner-side executives tied to active or planned North American stadium and arena projects and found enough public information to classify 50 of them.

The gap is uneven. Prior experience with a major capital program was more common among presidents, development executives and venue operators. Finance had the least: of the nine finance executives STR could classify, eight had no comparable project on record. That's the seat being asked to plan capital and financing for a building that will run for decades.

Career patterns explain much of it. STR cites SponsorUnited data showing 42% of team presidents across the five major U.S. leagues have spent their entire sports careers with one organization, and NFL finance executives average more than 12 years with their clubs, MLB finance leaders 10.5. Long tenure builds deep knowledge of a team's business. It doesn't produce stadium reps when a club can go decades without building.

A small circle of repeat builders

The people who do have the reps are concentrated. STR estimates that 15 to 20 meaningful stadium capital programs are in design, specification, procurement or construction in a typical year, with roughly 140 to 180 owner-side people holding real influence and another 100 to 130 recurring professionals outside the teams. In its review of 20 recent and current North American developments, the five most frequent firms appeared on 75% of projects, and at least one top-10 firm was on every one.

For most team executives, a stadium is a once-in-a-career project, while the five firms that turned up most often in STR's sample appeared on 75% of recent North American builds.

On the technology side, the circle is smaller still. STR names engineering and integration firms including ME Engineers, PMY, WJHW and AmpThink, owner's representative CAA ICON and architects Populous, HKS and HOK as recurring players, and estimates that perhaps 30 to 50 technical professionals carry outsized influence over network, wireless, AV and LED infrastructure. Both figures are working estimates, not head counts.

Some teams bring the repetitions in-house. At the new Nissan Stadium in Nashville, Titans technology chief Andrew McIntyre came in with eight years at the Chicago Cubs and five at Vinik Sports Group behind him, and his Vinik work covered Amalie Arena. In Buffalo, Bills IT infrastructure project director Shaun Handley has described how fan feedback on the old stadium, wireless above all, shaped priorities for the new Highmark Stadium. At Miami Freedom Park, Inter Miami Director of IT Daniel Vazquez has described the 26,000 fans at Nu Stadium as the connectivity baseline, though the same network must also serve stadium staff, team operations and point-of-sale systems. For the wider 131-acre development, Inter Miami chose HPE as its partner for network infrastructure, solutions and hybrid cloud.

Why this matters on a spec sheet: STR points out that a stadium may operate for 30 years or more while networks, displays, point-of-sale and security systems are replaced several times. A pathway or conduit decision made to trim capital cost can raise operating costs for years. A district plan like Beal's adds residents and retail to that equation, which could make early flexibility worth more.

Completion dates and who stands behind them

Moderator David Abrams, a senior director at Inner Circle Sports, asked whether developers should guarantee completion dates when so much sits outside their control. Beal's answer was blunt: a developer who won't commit to dates shouldn't be in the business, because delivering on them is the job.

Read beside STR's data, that position suggests where schedule confidence comes from. A developer running several districts at once, like Related in Queens and Santa Clara, builds repetitions that a team front office often can't. For owners whose finance or technology leads lack a comparable project, the party making the date commitment is likely to be the one with the most prior builds.

The strongest case against reading this as a capability gap comes from STR itself. Its census rests on public records, and "no comparable project identified" is not proof that an executive lacks relevant experience. Nearly half of the classified group, 23 people, did have verified venue work, 11 of them on repeat clean-sheet or similar builds. A CFO who has never built a stadium still knows finance; what's unfamiliar is doing finance inside a construction schedule where every decision is tied to the others.

The next marker is in Queens. Etihad Park is due to open in 2027 next to housing that is already occupied, and the days between NYCFC matches will show how well Beal's district test holds up.