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Adam Rittenberg, ESPN Senior Writer
When Northwestern opens the new Ryan Field in 2026, it will not only be the largest stadium project in college football history, with a price tag of $850 million, but possibly a model for future stadium designs around the sport.
Plans for the privately funded stadium, supported mostly by the Ryan family, were revealed Monday and shared with ESPN. The new Ryan Field has elements from recently constructed NFL stadiums as well as soccer facilities in MLS and the English Premier League. The stadium will have the Big Ten’s smallest capacity at 35,000, but emphasizes the experience for each spectator, which includes sightlines much closer to the field than traditional bowled stadiums, because of structural steel in the base of the stadium.
“Our worst seat in this stadium is 100 feet closer to the field than the most expensive seat at the Big House,” said Pat Ryan Jr., co-CEO of Ryan Sports Development, referring to 107,601-seat Michigan Stadium. “You’re building things up and cantilevering them over instead of going out. It’s structurally much more challenging from an engineering perspective, but you’ve got to create better-than-TV sightlines.”
Ryan, whose family is a minority owner of the Chicago Bears and has a stake in the EPL club AFC Bournemouth, surveyed multiple recent professional facilities during the design process. The new Ryan Field will feature a canopy that covers the entire seating area but not the playing field, and is designed to maximize sound. Northwestern’s student section will be positioned and designed more like a supporters’ section at top soccer stadiums.
Lower.com Field, which opened in 2021 as the new home for the MLS’ Columbus Crew, was the “most influential,” Ryan said, in shaping the design.
“A lot of people look at first-of-its-kind and say, ‘Oh, it’s just a mini NFL stadium,’ but it’s really something specific for college,” Ryan said. “Every college we’ve seen has said, ‘We know we need to think about doing something like this, but somebody needed to go first.’ Everybody else is saying, ‘We’re going to watch closely, and if it works, we’ll come see it.'”
Ryan said NFL teams are shrinking their stadium capacities, in part because of undesirable upper-deck seats. Although the new Ryan Field reduces seating capacity by 30%, the building will be 78% larger and the area it covers will increase by 125,000 square feet to accommodate several club and plaza areas for entertainment and dining. In addition to concerts, Ryan Field will have holiday festivals and host other sporting events and potentially championships. Athletic director Mark Jackson said Northwestern would like to host a women’s lacrosse Final Four at the new field.
The cost for new Ryan Field far surpasses the most for a new stadium built in college football, San Diego State’s Snapdragon Stadium at $310 million, or the biggest renovation, Texas A&M’s Kyle Field at $450 million. Northwestern, which had put aside funds in anticipation of a stadium renovation, will support part of the rebuild, but most will come from the Ryan family. The city of Evanston, Illinois, approved construction for the facility in November 2023.
“We’ve been a minority owner in the Bears for 34 years, and a lot of those NFL owners were very helpful, so we got a sense of where the world was going,” Ryan said. “When we decided to do this, we said, ‘It’s 100-year investment. What would you do?’ You wouldn’t build something for the past, and you wouldn’t perfume the pig in the old stadium. You would figure out how you create something that really puts you into the future in a way that the world is going.”