NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Since 2015, the Titans’ have made great strides to become a more contemporary franchise, remodeling their practice facility and erecting an additional building, hiring a load of new people and creating new departments, finding steady football people and winning at a more regular clip despite coming up short of the Super Bowl.
Courtesy Tennessee Titans
The next step is a new stadium, which the city of Nashville and the team officially agreed upon Monday but will still need to be signed off on by Metro Nashville city council and the Sports Authority.
The indoor, translucent, 1.7 million-square-foot venue will seat 55,000 to 60,000, enough for the NFL to bring Super Bowls to Music City, which will also draw big events like the college football National Championship Game, The Final Four, Wrestlemania and year-round concerts.
It will be designed by Manica Architecture, which recently designed the Las Vegas Raiders Allegiant Stadium and the Golden State Warriors Chase Center. During a lengthy process that began with the thought of refurbishing Nissan Stadium, the team tried to plan for all options so it’s ahead in planning the building and has a thorough understanding of the fit and style, but not architectural renderings.
The venue will fit in the space between Nissan Stadium and I-24 with the old stadium being demolished once the team moves into the new one.
The field will be turf and the team will yield roughly 66 acres on the East Bank of the Cumberland River back to the city. Some of that will become greenspace between the stadium and the river with pocket parks that will also function as flood mitigation and could work overall to recall The Grove at Ole Miss.
Parking will obviously be complicated during building – with shuttles at a premium. But once it’s over, the plan is for an extended “blast radius” where 7,400 vehicles are not looking to arrive and depart simultaneously, creating issues. There will be a transit station near the new stadium and the team and city will seek to alter fan thinking from “where do I park” to “how do I get to the game.”
It’s a 30-year lease with a total project cost of $2.1 billion, including $30 million to pay off existing bonds on Nissan Stadium and the demolition of the building.
The state is in for $500 million.
The city will help finance $760 million through revenue bonds tied to a one percent hotel tax, sales taxes in the stadium and on the surrounding campus and ticket taxes. There is no connected property taxes or general sales tax.
The Titans, with help from the NFL’s stadium program, will pay the remainder -- $840 million - and will be responsible for overruns and maintenance.
Personal seat licenses will be part of the Titans' piece of the financing.
Existing PSL holders will have priority access to buy new ones. A plan is being drawn up that will credit current PSL holders toward new PSLs in line with the value of the year the current PSL was acquired.
Jefffery Simmons on a new #Titans stadium. pic.twitter.com/RImLl6rs8z
— Paul Kuharsky (@PaulKuharskyNFL) October 17, 2022
The city saves between $1.75 and $1.95 billion that was unfunded. Nashville would have been on the hook for that out of its general fund if the Titans triggered a lease extension on Nissan Stadium that would have obligated Nashville to provide a "first-class" stadium through 2039.
It’s unclear at this early stage if Nissan will retain naming rights.
The rake of the stadium, the way the seats line up with regard to the field, will be more compact and intimate. The upper deck will fall halfway into the club section.
Outside of those who are purely anti-stadium and anti-NFL, it’s hard to find a lot of fault with what we know of the plan and the cost distribution so far.
There is no timeline yet for a shovel in the dirt, though obviously nothing could happen until the Titans' season ends.
Allegiant Stadium took 31 months to build. If the Titans started in August of 2023, 31 months would take them to March of 2026.
Here is the letter that team president and CEO Burke Nihil wrote to fans.
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