Caught in Possession

We are fortunate that Maryland has a very effective and professional process for assessing stadiums. The Maryland Stadium Authority is a great asset for the state of Maryland.

Look, RFK is a great old building in many ways, but it’s falling apart. There doesn’t seem to be ability to spend significant capital dollars on it. It also isn’t modern in a lot of important revenue-generating ways for us. The concourses are very small, the food service facilities are very poor…So we just can’t exist. We can’t compete, we can’t exist if we don’t have a modern stadium.

There will certainly be some differences [from the previous Poplar Point renderings]…We’re actually hoping to have a naming rights partner before we fully design the stadium, and we hope they’ll be involved too…there’s certain things that we want to have for sure. We want to have a roof that covers all of the seats. We want a stadium that borrows from the traditions of the game in other parts of the world, but is still modern, and iconic in look and feel...We will have a permanent stage, a large-scale stage, like in Dallas.

It’s hard to make training facilities work on urban land, so we will hope that there’s some land that’s proximate, not too far away but not really on the same site...Between the training facility…since we’re not doing a suburban type of stadium – what would be office building land, you can’t say that’s going to be a training field. That’s too expensive.

There’s always frustration when a business transaction doesn’t get done the way you would like it to get done. But I’m a business guy – we all move on.