Northwestern University’s new $850 million stadium project has two notable and almost contradictory superlatives. Upon its completion in 2026, it will be the most expensive college football stadium ever built. It will also have the fewest seats among the 34 Power Two teams.
The new Ryan Field, majority financed by the billionaire Ryan family, will have 35,000 seats. That’s 12,000 fewer than the school’s previous football venue, and 42,000 seats smaller than the average among the other Big Ten and SEC schools. The next smallest venue in that cohort is 40,550 (Vanderbilt), and it was built in 1922.
So what is Northwestern thinking? First, there are some practical considerations. Geometrically, without a 40,000-seat upper bowl, the entire stadium can be closer to the action, allowing for better sightlines. Financially, upper bowl seats are the most expensive to build and typically produce the least revenue.
More broadly, however, attendance across college football is down about 13% since 2010, and many schools with bigger venues struggle to fill the upper reaches of their stadiums. The bulk of the ticket money is generated from premium seating—suites, box seats and other hospitality areas—and the new Ryan Field will have four different tiers of those pricier options.
“So the question is: How do you invest in something that’s not just putting more people in the rafters?” Patrick Ryan Jr. said in an interview. “You get rid of the worst seats, but create better experiences for everyone who is there. That’s the trend I think we’re going to see.”
The school experienced a microcosm of this economic reality in the last few years. The Wildcats played the 2023 season in the old Ryan Field, a 47,000-seat venue built in 1926, which had just one section of premium seating, a skybox with about 350 seats. This year, the Wildcats played their first four games in a 12,000-seat temporary venue that had significantly more premium seats. The pop-up venue generated more revenue per game, according to athletic director Mark Jackson, despite being less than a quarter of the capacity.
In the new venue, about 10% of the venue will be in higher-priced premium areas, and those fans will cover 40-50% of the revenue each game, Ryan said. He added that the group plans to use that advantage to also offer some tickets for cheaper than they did in the original Ryan Field.
“In the old stadium we were subsidizing the rich,” he said.
Ryan, whose family is an limited partner in the Chicago Bears, said he spoke to other colleges about their venues and repeatedly heard the same thing: That fans in upper bowls tend to leave their seats, head down to a lower concourse and socialize like they’re in a sports bar. In a world where fans can watch any game, from any angle, from the comfort of their couch, the cheap seats weren’t attractive. But in-venue socializing was.
Instead of adding to the stadium tab with more seats, Ryan says his family instead emphasized more than 200,000 square feet of plazas and open areas around the stadium. Those are all within the grounds of the stadium footprint, so ticket-holders don’t queue up to enter the building, but rather to enter the grounds.
“The building is twice as big per fan as our old building from a square footage perspective, even though we took out a third of the seating,” Ryan said, “because of the experiences we invested in instead.”
Northwestern isn’t alone in thinking smaller. The NFL has a policy, for now, that venues must have capacity of 70,000 seats to host the Super Bowl, but new stadiums in that league are getting smaller. The Buffalo Bills are building at roughly 60,000, as are the Tennessee Titans. Stanford in 2005 renovated its stadium to reduce capacity to 50,026 from 85,000.
That said, in the race for revenue in college sports, many schools are doing the opposite. Amid a jump to the ACC this past year, SMU underwent a $100 million project that will increase its football capacity to 45,000 from 32,000. Rutgers, following its 2014 move to the Big Ten, increased capacity to 52,454 from 41,500.
