Seahawks' next owners may want a new Lumen Field. Good luck getting it
In 1997, Paul Allen offered Seattle Seahawks fans a stark choice.
If state voters agreed to pay for most of a new stadium to replace the Kingdome, Allen, billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, would buy the Seattle Seahawks and stop then-owner Ken Behring from taking the team to California.
They held their noses and voted yes," pollster Stuart Elway told The Seattle Times of the narrow victory for Referendum 48, which paved the way for Seahawks Stadium, as Lumen Field was called when it opened in 2002.
With the Hawks again for sale, will Washingtonians face a similar choice?
Probably not anytime soon.
True, Lumen will be 30 when the Hawks' lease with the Washington State Public Stadium Authority expires in 2032.
And these days, 30 is when NFL teams push to remodel or replace even perfectly serviceable stadiums.
A stadium of Lumen's vintage "definitely is going to be, if you will, obsolete in the views of ownership," said Irwin Kishner, who co-chairs the sports law practice at New York-based Herrick and has handled numerous transactions for NFL teams.
Yet so far, prospects for a new round of Seattle stadium drama seem slim.
Unlike 1997, there's little risk of the Hawks leaving town, mainly because there simply isn't a better market without an NFL franchise.
And while a buyer might want to replace Lumen - which, among other things, has below-average ticket revenue - the odds of that happening soon are modest.
For starters, stadiums today can run two to three times Lumen's $430 million cost, and voters are less willing to "hold their noses" and subsidize them, especially in states with budget holes.
Public funding for even part of a new stadium "would be a tough sell, given the cuts we're having to make," said Jamie Pedersen, state Senate majority leader.
Even a privately financed football stadium would be a stretch in Seattle today, given the city's inability to site a much smaller basketball venue not so long ago, said Craig Kinzer, a Seattle real estate veteran and former co-owner of the Seattle Sonics with firsthand experience on stadium projects.
Any potential buyer has probably already looked into Seattle's stadium history and concluded that a new venue is "not going to happen real soon," Kinzer said.
Neither the Seahawks nor representatives for the Allen estate responded to questions about Lumen's prospects.
Lumen Field is going strong
This isn't to hate on Lumen Field, which the Hawks share with the Seattle Sounders and the Seattle Reign soccer teams.
The towering stadium has sold out every home game since 2003, despite often inhospitable weather and some lackluster seasons.
It's renowned for innovations like the league's first field-level suites and intimidating acoustics.
Lumen has also kept current with $150 million in renovations. That includes new video screens, more luxury suites, a powerful Wi-Fi system, sports bar makeovers, a new sound system for concerts and lots of boring but critical infrastructure upgrades, such as a new HVAC system.
"The building is damn-near brand new, except for its concrete," said Fred Mendoza, longtime chair of the stadium authority, which leases Lumen to the Seahawks for $1.7 million a year and funds most renovations through parking and admission taxes and naming-rights fees.
Those steady upgrades are a big reason Lumen, which is also getting special renovations for this summer's World Cup, ranks near the top of the league for attendance at concerts and other nonsporting events.
Despite all that love, Lumen still lags on football finances.
In 2024, Lumen netted $109 million in ticket sales after taxes, fees and surcharges, or around $164 per ticket, according to league attendance data obtained by CNBC.
That's around 2% below the league average, and as much as 35% less than newer venues like Levi's Stadium near San Francisco and Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, according to CNBC.
A quarter-century ago, Lumen "was at the upper end of NFL stadiums," said Michael Ozanian, a senior sports reporter at CNBC and an expert in team finance and valuations. "That's not the case anymore."
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How much would Washingtonians pay now?
To be fair, Ozanian noted, people who buy NFL teams aren't expecting to get rich off ticket sales.
Of the roughly $23 billion the NFL reportedly made last year, around two-thirds came from the league's increasingly lucrative national media deals, licensing and sponsorships, which are split among the 32 teams, according to Sportico, which covers sports finance.
That said, the NFL still gets nearly a quarter of its haul from tickets, concessions, parking and other stadium revenues, according to Sportico. And as buying a team gets more expensive - the Hawks could fetch up to $9 billion, or roughly four times what teams cost a decade ago - owners are trying to squeeze out more stadium revenue.
For a new Seahawks owner, though, Lumen could be hard to squeeze.
Owners could try to raise Seahawks ticket prices, which last year averaged $149, or less than tickets at 14 other NFL stadiums, according to single-game ticket data from SeatGeek. They could replace some general admission seats with more of the pricey luxury suites.
But in this era of laser-sharp market analysis, any pro team is already charging exactly as much as their fans will tolerate, and for all the gusto of Hawks fans, Seattle isn't yet a top-spending NFL market like Detroit, Philadelphia or Las Vegas.
Any new owner "is going to have to operate within those market dynamics," said John Wilson, an attorney who leads the U.S. sports law group at K&L Gates in Seattle and works with teams and ownership groups.
Coming in and raising ticket prices or replacing more regular seats with luxury boxes, Wilson said, would be "a great way to alienate your fanbase."
Sodo a tight fit for 'stadium district'
Pricing limits like this are why pro teams now look for revenue outside of their stadiums.
One growing trend is the stadium "district," with new stadiums anchoring mixed-use developments of shops, restaurants, hotels, housing and businesses that can boost foot traffic and soak up more fan dollars.
Teams no longer see "themselves as just being in the stadium business," said K&L's Wilson. "They're in the real estate and entertainment district business."
Lumen isn't a natural fit for the district model either.
Current and planned NFL districts typically run from 100 acres to 300 acres, said Jacob Rowden, research director and a stadium expert at JLL, a real estate firm.
Lumen, by contrast, was shoehorned onto a 31-acre parcel - roughly the old Kingdome site - which it shares with an event center, WAMU Theater and parking. The footprint was the smallest of any new NFL stadium.
One of the few places a new owner could develop - Lumen's north parking lot - serves as a staging area for concerts and other events, a function the stadium authority "is very jealous about retaining," Mendoza said.
And where some NFL cities with smaller stadiums have created districts organically, by encouraging nearby private development, that has proved challenging at Lumen.
The neighborhood has some housing, restaurants and bars, and other consumer businesses, but is still largely industrial, hemmed in by railroad tracks and arterials, with a hodgepodge of property owners.
Efforts to boost mixed-use development and foot traffic around Lumen and nearby T-Mobile Park, via a formal stadium district, have hit political snags.
Freight companies and the Port of Seattle have opposed nonindustrial development in Sodo out of concern that additional traffic will hinder Port activities.
That resistance was a big reason Chris Hansen couldn't build a basketball arena just south of T-Mobile Park, and why the Seattle City Council recently shelved plans for affordable housing in Sodo.
The Issaquah Seahawks? Unlikely
Kinzer, the real estate veteran, thinks natural market demand will eventually bring more housing, retail and other dense, districtlike development to the stadium neighborhood.
But, he adds, "I don't think it's soon enough that a new owner would put it into its short-term stadium calculus."
In the meantime, some industry experts think the challenges of upgrading or expanding Lumen might lead a new owner to build a new stadium outside the city, as other NFL teams have done.
But industry veterans like Kinzer, who led the unsuccessful search for a new Sonics stadium site before the team left town, think a suburban football stadium site wouldn't be a slam dunk, given the inevitable resistance to large-scale development.
Even if a site were found, it wouldn't have Lumen's access to light rail, ferries, buses and highways. Adding that kind of infrastructure would be prohibitively expensive, Mendoza said.
"I don't know what it costs to build a freeway offramp these days, but it's probably the same cost as a stadium, if you could get the state to approve it," Mendoza said.
'The return on ego is fantastic'
Given those roadblocks, industry observers don't expect a new owner to rush into a new stadium project, even if they want one.
With six years left on Lumen's current lease, and options for 30 more years, Wilson thinks 10 to 15 years is the soonest fans could expect to see the Seahawks in new digs.
CNBC's Ozanian said a stadium timeline depends in part on the new owners' finances and their appetite for risk.
Building a stadium district might add revenue eventually. But it would also add risk to a venture that was likely to be profitable anyway, given that the NFL's media rights income and teams' resale values are only going up.
As a former team owner, Kinzer has a slightly different take.
He said sports owners don't always manage teams like conventional businesses.
Instead, a big part of the "profit" from a sports team is the psychic pleasure of possessing a rare, high-profile asset. Even for a minority owner, Kinzer said, "the return on ego is fantastic."
As a result, a team owner might wait longer to profit on their investment than if they'd bought a factory or an office tower, simply because they enjoy being in a select club.
But they also might be more willing to pull the trigger on an expensive new stadium just to keep up with other owners.
It will not be lost on a new Seahawks owner that the Tennessee Titans' $2 billion, soon-to-open enclosed stadium in Nashville was a big reason they were just selected to host the 2030 Super Bowl.
So when fans try to gauge what's going to happen to their Seahawks, Kinzer said, "that's what you're looking at - return on ego.
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