Pitch to Pro
Pitch to Pro is the official podcast of Ozark United FC. This will be our platform to tell our story about the club and the special place that we call home, Northwest Arkansas. This is a journey. We want to bring you along for the ride. We'll share what's going on behind the curtain, help educate the community at large about soccer, Our league, and give updates on the progress of the club along the way.
Together, we'll explore and unpack our journey to professional soccer, the magic that is NWA, our community, and talk all things soccer from on the pitch to behind the scenes, telling the story of our club.
Pitch to Pro
Stoppage Time Special: Trends In Mixed-Use Developments
Discover how the world of sports is reshaping entertainment and hospitality landscapes in this captivating Stoppage Time edition of the Pitch to Pro podcast. Ever wondered how Sports Illustrated and major sports leagues are transforming the traditional boundaries with innovative resort experiences and mixed-use real estate developments? We're unpacking these transformative trends and offering a deep dive into the strategic moves by Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, and the NFL as they reimagine what sports districts can offer. With a keen eye on tailoring stadiums and venues to fit their local communities, we explore how these developments are not only changing the game but also revitalizing the neighborhoods they inhabit.
Join us as we analyze the financial mechanics powering these projects. With significant capital flowing into the sports and real estate sectors, investment groups are strategically positioning themselves to maximize returns. From MLB's district dominance to the NFL's ambitious all-year-round venue strategies, we discuss the impact these moves have on the future of sports entertainment. Expect insights into why right-sizing venues is crucial and how sports entities are crafting unique branded destinations. Whether you're a sports enthusiast or a real estate mogul, this episode offers a glimpse into the future where sports, entertainment, and hospitality converge to create unforgettable experiences.
Welcome to the Stoppage Time edition of the Pitch to Pro podcast. This is a highlight reel of some of the best moments from the show so far, and every other week we will be bringing you a special five to seven minute segment featuring the best stories, tales and moments of the podcast.
Speaker 2:I think the piece you mentioned about that is just the larger place where entertainment and hospitality is going in terms of just the experience, the, the ability for a strong brand to grow beyond kind of its boundaries, to your point, whether that's through uh entertainment venues or live music and concert, but also just like branded, branded destinations, brand experience. We see it a lot on the hospitality side as well and it's really interesting to see groups like Sports Illustrated pitching resorts or weekend game day destinations in collegiate towns and we even talked about the collegiate world in terms of mixed-year anchor real estate plays tied to sports, and that's a whole other place. But I would imagine you're going to see, yes, a lot beyond, kind of the big five sports call it right, and so it's really interesting. When you start tracking, I'm like yes, it is a big trend and there's a lot happening, but maybe the numbers aren't as necessarily large as you would expect. Not every team has one of these. As I mentioned, mlb really kind of leads the way right in terms of what's happening from a district perspective. I think they have something like let me try not to get on something like 20 or so of the 30, maybe 21 of the 30 have some sort of development 16 already exist or so, with another one in construction and five being planned.
Speaker 2:Um, major league soccer, maybe on the opposite side, right? Uh, coming in really only has, call it two existing, 300 construction and then another six plans. You can kind of see where soccer maybe is a newer sport in america, is is sort of still trailing a little bit, but I think also, again, length itself, especially if you right-size these venues to a market. That makes sense, right, I guess. The other thing not every stadium has to be a 40,000-seat venue. We've been proponents for a long time of doing 5,000 to 12,000-seaters that fit the market. You're in. Again, it's that piece about being local or contextual. Nfl, I think they have eight or so existing, with another two we could point to, under construction, rather eight in planning right now.
Speaker 2:What you're seeing about the NFL ones, which is really interesting, and again the trend, most of the new ones being proposed or involved are going to be done or planned as done, because again, of that year-round need, expertise and similar to soccer, I think one of the struggles with post football at that scale is how many folks can really fill that venue, how many times a year, right. So, yeah, you're going to get a dozen or so games, if you're lucky, and then however many Taylor Swift concerts and a couple other country artists, and I'm guessing that's about it for a venue that scale. So how do you make those more of a venue that could use your route and then have that district around it, complement that in some sense? And so I think what's really interesting is you actually see the most in plan in the NFL right now. Again, I'm only talking Big Five for a minute. Nba NHL you can kind of probably bunch those together because many of those venues are combined, but something between maybe five for each right now and another five, I don't know like 11 in plan or something like that, maybe another four if they're shared. So I have some numbers, but you can kind of get a sense. It's not all of a sudden. Hey, there's 140 or 150, 50 or so, and planned and proposed right now and have been done today, and so you can kind of see again that's where things are shifting.
Speaker 2:I think the most interesting piece of it is you're seeing that's where the capital is flowing as well, right, and so all of a sudden, a lot of these groups are either crafting their own development groups.
Speaker 2:You're seeing spin outs of a lot of the large investment organizations crafting funds for vehicles for real estate, where they can come in and say, let us leverage our understanding of the sports, or we've done this before, but then bring some capital to the table as well through our funds and investing this.
Speaker 2:And you're also seeing that I think with just what's happening with private equity and the investment in the teams, I would imagine all the private equity vehicles will have a real estate fund set up sooner than later, and so again you can then see there's an upward trend. There's not that many yet, you know, but they're happening and that's not even counting. This is where I think the numbers would explode and it is part of our plan at RC Outgo to kind of go back and continue to add to that tracker is to add all of the rest of the leagues that haven't yet been incorporated. When you start talking about USL, mwsl and all these other groups, there's a lot smaller, more appropriate venues that are going to be anchoring developments and anchoring projects coming along in the next five to 10 years, and I think.
Speaker 3:So you just started, in that last little three to five minute section, kind of spinning into where I was going to ask you next, which is some of the impacts that we're starting to see from this trend, and you started touching on it a little bit. It's not just about okay, well, yes, the venue itself and what is development look like. It also has impacts to ownership group structure. It also has impact to how you know, if you're a current team, and what am I thinking about over the next 10 to 15 years and what do I need to do and where am I? You know, organizing and either raising funds or deploying funds. If you're an expansion team, what does that mean and what do I now need to think about? So talk a little bit about keep expanding a little bit on some of those topics, if you would, on how this has changed sports in particular, and you can look at that from a couple different lenses and you know this has reshaped, I think, the landscape in a lot of different ways.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean to your point about ownership. I was just and I'll have to plug my own paper after all this so you can go back and read the actual numbers. I was trying to spit off the top of my head real quick but again I think I'll be close. On the ownership side, it's interesting the percent of existing mixed-use developments where the team or the owner is involved somewhere around 40%, I believe. So again, that older model you're seeing on it, the planned mixed-use projects that we just talked about and the percentage of those planned projects where owners or teams are involved is about 70%. So that's a pretty significant I mean almost what is it? It's 30% actual delta, but it's almost double in terms of what has happened to date versus where things are going. And again, that's just looking kind of at the big five right now, and so I think you'll see a lot more opportunity there.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us for this stoppage time special of the Pitch to Pro podcast. If you've enjoyed the conversation, you can click watch the full episode here. Be sure to tune in next Thursday for a new episode of the Pitch to Pro podcast, the official podcast of Ozark United FC, Available on YouTube, Instagram and everywhere you get your podcasts.