If you had visited any football, rugby or cricket stadium a decade ago outside of match days you would invariably have seen it closed up and shut off from both the wider community around it as well as any visiting tourists.
Of course there were the occasional sightseeing stadium tours but the idea of a stadium as a year-round asset was something few clubs considered central to the investment case. However, things are changing fast with forward thinking clubs taking ideas from across the Atlantic as well as from the hospitality space to turn their assets into 365-day operations.
New activations include private members’ clubs and restaurants with developments like Fulham Pier part of the football clubs Riverside Stand development, looking to maximise revenue beyond football fixtures.
"The stadium is 25 days a year. We are 340 days a year,” said Glen Sutton, director at Fulham Pier speaking at Bisnow’s European Sports and Entertainment Conference.
In its opening marketing material Fulham FC described it as: A new riverside destination in South-West London full of amazing places to eat and drink, plus a year-round cultural programme of events for all the family, from comedy gigs and toddler discos, to yoga and riverside chess.
The idea represents a shift in thinking.
“You're not building a stadium anymore with some ancillary experiences, that is completely the wrong way to look at it. You are placemaking a new environment, of which the football stadium, or sports stadium, or entertainment is commercially a big part, but experientially the smaller part,” said Sutton.
The cost of the wider development has been pegged at around £100 million, a very significant investment for the football club and while revenue targets have not been disclosed, the scale of the offering suggests the club is betting that hospitality, wellness, events and membership will become increasingly important revenue streams.
As if to illustrate the point, Sutton pointed out: "There is only one permanent logo of the football club in this building."
Indeed, the hotelisation of real estate is something we’ve neem tracking across all asset classes with stadiums clearly being another heavily influenced with what hospitality can offer.
Restaurants and hotels (as well as retail) help extend the cash generating timeframe of the stadium beyond the match day as well as extending dwell time on any given event day. It’s similar to what has happened at some of the best airports in the world, which have morphed from transport hubs to shopping and even wellness destinations.
Learning from the US
It is always worth looking across the Atlantic to what US sports teams are doing. For every Fenway Park, rooted in the history of Boston there are plenty of suburban developments that are surrounded by thousands of car parking spaces that can feel as alienating to outsiders as any in Europe.
However there are more modern examples that are trying to change things. The Dallas Cowboys’ 90-acre training centre in Frisco, 30 miles north of Dallas. It cost around $1.5 billion to develop and features two outdoor practice fields, a 12,000-seat indoor stadium, a sports therapy centre, as well as hotels, and retail spaces.
“[The Dallas Cowboys] were trying to sweat every single part of their commercial assets,” said Vicky Jaycock, VP of global sales at Legends Global.
Elsewhere, European clubs are learning how to improve their retail operations and make them more experiential.
“It's no surprise that the US are seen as pioneers of big retail and sports retail, in particular. You only need to see the flagship stores on Oxford Street from the major athletic brands, very little are they actually offering the product to buy, but complete immersive experiences,” Jaycock added.