New venues: The K.C. blueprint

CPKC Stadium features a handful of creative premium and group seating products for guests attending Kansas City Current matches, including this one in the southwest corner.kansas city current

ESPN pushed back the start time for the Kansas City Current’s March 30 match against Angel City FC so that its preceding Bundesliga coverage didn’t spill into the time allotted to two of NWSL’s buzziest clubs.

The game was the second ever held at CPKC Stadium, the Current’s privately financed $125 million venue, the first stadium purposely built for a women’s professional soccer team and an 11,500-seat venue whose flowing horseshoe-shaped canopy is lifting women’s sports Atlas-like. Because the Current owns its stadium, moving the game time was no issue. No other entity had to be consulted. And because of the stadium and league’s sudden importance, ESPN cared enough to ask.

“If you think about the Kansas City Current as the center of a concentric circle, everything is built around that [stadium], right?” Raven Jemison, Current president of business operations, said before the match started. “They get first dibs at the schedule, like our match today, being able to move it based on what works best from a broadcasting point. Those things you just don’t have access to when you’re in someone else’s stadium.”

Angie and Chris Long’s investment banking history helped land financing for CPKC Stadium.bret mccormick

“They invested in this team like a pro team, not a women’s team. And that’s made all the difference,” said Patti Phillips, CEO of Kansas City-based Women Leaders in Sports, which held one of the first private events at the stadium in February.

“It only feels new because people haven’t done it for a women’s team,” said Angie Long. “But it doesn’t feel new at all in the way that you approach a sports team that you’re really investing in.”

The importance of CPKC Stadium stretches far beyond the symbolic. JPMorgan financed the stadium; now there is a blueprint for the next one. The venue’s financial performance will provide baselines that could lure more equity, capital, broadcast/media and sponsorship investment into the NWSL and other women’s sports. It further professionalizes women’s sports, forcing competitors to meet a raised bar.

“Angie and Chris are like the perfect firsts because they really don’t need the road to have been paved by someone else because their actions are shaped by what can be, not measured by the past,” NWSL Commissioner Jessica Berman said in January. “Because they are credible, smart businesspeople, it has gotten the attention of other credible, smart businesspeople. They believe in it from an investment perspective.”

The Current expects a $20 million bump in annual revenue this year by playing in a stadium it owns and operates and plans on becoming one of the “top clubs in the world as far as women’s sports in the financial aspect of the business,” Chris Long said. The first match at the Generator Studio-designed stadium delivered 200% of projected revenue, with a big lift from the team store, which had to close at one point during the match to restock, despite preparing for a blitz from eager fans.

“We can be the standard in understanding sports business from a women’s sports perspective,” said Jemison. “Too often, we’re the second and third tenant; that is not the case here. And the onus is on us to show what’s possible when you do invest in women and you invest in a stadium specifically for women’s soccer, women’s sports. There is a lot we can do here.”

The sprint

Two hours after the inaugural match at CPKC Stadium finished — a wild 5-4 victory over the Portland Thorns in which the Current nearly surrendered a 5-1 lead — Angie Long thought of her husband. Busy celebrating the occasion in the Pitch Club with fans and players, she hadn’t seen him in a while. Angie found him sitting in front of the owners’ suite, the stadium pretty much empty at that point. Chris was, he said, just sitting, watching, absorbing.

The first few years of the Current’s existence were a blur. When the team began play in 2021, the limitations of playing in others’ stadiums — first at the Legends Field ballpark, then two seasons at Sporting KC’s Children’s Mercy Health Park — were immediately obvious. By that point, the Longs had already commenced efforts to build a training facility. The players had to have a home. Now the club and its fans would, too.

“I don’t know that I’ve ever been asked to finance a women’s-only facility before this one,” said Zach Effron, the JPMorgan executive director who oversees the investment bank’s sports business, which has provided billions of dollars in financing for projects like SoFi Stadium and Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabéu renovations. Lenders look for historicals, said Effron, “and here, those really didn’t exist. That made this interesting.”

Both Longs worked at JPMorgan previously. Angie was there for 13 years, reaching managing director by the age of 29 and winning a reputation as a credit derivatives pioneer. The Longs later founded Palmer Square –—named after a public plaza near the University of Princeton, where the former college athletes met — a boutique financial services company with $29 billion of assets under management. The couple leaned on long-standing relationships at JPMorgan for a chance to sell a purpose-built women’s professional soccer stadium.

“They’re maybe very Kansas City, very likable, very personable people,” said Effron, “but they’re Wall Street people, and they’re super dialed in. Every model they presented to us was highly detailed, every assumption we drilled into they had all the backup we could ask for. They approached this the same way they approach any business they run. There was never any ‘just trust us on it.’”

The detailed plan, Kansas City’s sports market strength, the size of the stadium and the potential of women’s sports, soccer particularly, convinced Effron and company to do the deal.

“There wasn’t even that cushion of support for a lender, and now, I do think it’s changed the game,” Chris Long said. “The next person that wants to do a training facility, wants to do a stadium, there is a precedent out there on the women’s side that they can point to that’s as high quality as it gets and that’s been a success.”

The biggest bar in the stadium, the Scoreboard Bar, sits on the river side of the stadium.bret mccormick

CPKC Stadium, open on the north side with its white canopy and pop-of-teal seats, is parked next to Interstate 29 and the Bond Bridge, the main entry point to Kansas City from the north and one of the region’s busiest stretches of road. The stadium would be its and the club’s own billboard, the KC skyline rising behind it.

Through an agreement with the city, the project team — including architects Generator Studio, Legends as project manager, and JE Dunn and Monarch Build as joint contractors — started work with just footing and foundation permits, said Monarch Build owner and founder Courtney Kounkel, before securing full permitting later in the process. What Generator Studio Senior Project Designer Jill Monaghan termed “an insanely fast construction schedule” screeched into life, with elements of the design still being finalized after construction was underway.

A clear vision enabled execution. There couldn’t be a modicum of doubt. Finally breathing after a nearly perfect first match, it crashed down on Chris Long as he sat in a mostly empty CPKC Stadium.

“I just had to take a moment,” he said later. “Wow.”

The swing

Jemison was scaling the sports industry ladder as the Milwaukee Bucks’ executive vice president of business operations when the KC Current president’s role opened this year after former President Allison Howard and the club went separate ways.

Jemison said she’d already developed KC Current FOMO by that point. Ten minutes into her first conversation with Angie Long, the vision for the team, for women’s soccer, women’s professional sports … women, generally, was clear. The stadium project — coupled with the chance to build a women’s sports business almost from scratch — played a major role in recruiting both Howard (Los Angeles Lakers) and Jemison from NBA teams.

“It was one of those things that you said to yourself, ‘If I’m not a part of it, I’m going to look back on this and regret it,’” said Jemison.

Nods to women’s sports history, including the 85ers, the first U.S. women’s national soccer team, are scattered throughout.bret mccormick

Naming-rights deals, parking, food and beverage, retail sales — the team’s two-story team store designed by Generator Studio is open five days a week — and event hosting — the club anticipates annually hosting 150 non-match-day events and 20 major stadium events outside of the Current’s regular season — have all been added to the Current’s profit and loss report. Each is a revenue stream historically unavailable to women’s pro sports teams.

The stadium ballooned existing revenue streams, too, like season tickets, which sold out even as the season-ticket base grew 50% compared to last season. Season-ticket members make up about 75% of CPKC Stadium’s capacity, and there is a waitlist with “thousands of people on it,” said Dan Boyd, Current vice president of sales and service. Those on the waitlist pay $50 for a spot in what’s called the Current Club.

There is a new experience to be created in a purpose-built women’s sports stadium. At CPKC Stadium, it starts with proximity to the action. The farthest seat is 94 feet from the pitch, and a single row of seats on the stadium’s river side are only 12 feet from the pitch. The Current’s VAR (video assistant referee) screen rests pitchside within a Yeti cooler, a clever sponsor activation; fans sit directly behind the cooler, staring at the match officials as they study replays. The tight setting creates a connection with the action, the team, the league, not as easily made in bigger venues.

“This is true across the country — there aren’t facilities of this caliber of that size,” said Angie Long.

The stadium contains loge boxes ($3,780 per ticket per season), loge rails ($3,500 per ticket), the Pitch Club ($5,250 per ticket) and West Sideline Club ($2,800 per ticket), as well as 13 suites, all sold out on mostly multiyear agreements. Little details like a split-flap train station departures board that greets premium guests nod to the stadium’s naming-rights sponsor, the newly formed railroad behemoth CPKC; while the art deco-era bar in the Pitch Club is a reminder of Kansas City’s gangster-laden history of a hundred years ago.

Generator Studio’s interior design for the Pitch Club referenced KC’s past.bret mccormick

Local restaurateurs Colby and Megan Garrelts (their restaurant, Rye, is a James Beard Award winner) developed a locally focused food and beverage program that includes nine restaurant partners, almost none of which has previous sports venue experience, as well as a seasonal rotating menu in premium areas. Levy is operating the stadium’s F&B, which includes a heavy sustainability lean. No single-use plastic will be sold in the stadium, with reusable cups in play instead.

The premium areas provide ideal settings for a beefed-up corporate event-hosting business, just one of the ways the Current was able to provide more, and receive more, from existing and new sponsors because of the stadium. Just this past offseason, the Current added CPKC, DFA, Helzberg, Mazuma, Visit Missouri, Samsung, UMKC, United Way, TUKHS, Yeti, and 21c to its corporate sponsorship roster. HyVee and BlueKC expanded the scope of their existing deals. There are some key assets, like the two premium clubs, that the Current haven’t sold yet that were intentionally held back to see how the market reacts to the stadium’s impact and success.

Longer term, there is a real estate revenue line in the works, too. The Current bought 20 acres of adjacent land from PortKC when it did the stadium deal and there is a land development agreement, though the club hasn’t revealed much else about the project other than it will break ground after this NWSL season finishes and be complete before the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup. More near term, the $20 million annual revenue jump Angie Long is predicting this season because of the stadium should easily take the Current to the top of the league in that metric.   

“We’ve seen the swing Angie is describing between last season and this season,” Chris Long said, “and what a stadium means for corporate partners, for all the things that go into it. It’s a substantial change.”

The context

One of the first events held at CPKC Stadium was before it officially opened, on a cool, quiet February night as the sun set. No supporters section drumming, no lines snaking out the team store door.

The Women Leaders in Sports board members gathered there included athletic directors from some of the top universities in the country, women whose sports programs boast elite facilities thanks to Title IX regulations. Amid the quiet solemnity of an empty but brightly lit stadium, they were floored.

“College sports have facilities galore. But there was something about this being the first that I think everyone felt that energy,” said group CEO Phillips. “They’re all women, understanding the magnitude of the moment.” 

Pro sports don’t have Title IX protections, which has made the facilities investment effort even harder. The facilities inequity conversation exists, even as successes like Caitlin Clark and women’s basketball, or surging NWSL valuations and a new media deal for that league, elevate women’s sports to a new level of public awareness. Phillips described an inner tug of war for women involved in sports during the past five decades, feeling bitterness on one hand over what took so long for a place like CPKC Stadium to exist, and on the other, simply enjoying and reveling in the fact that it exists at all.

“It’s always been second-class, or handed-down uniforms, or someone else’s stadium,” Phillips said. “So, you cannot overstate the gravity of the moment for this team and this city and for the ripple effects it’s going to have.”

The KC Current expects a roughly $20 million annual revenue swing from 2023 to 2024, owing to the opening of CPKC Stadium. The club’s season-ticket base grew 50% this past offseason.getty images

Professionalizing women’s pro sports has been prioritized at every step by the Longs, beginning with the training center and carrying over to the stadium. It boasts a subterranean heating and air system under the pitch, and the first LED grow lights in a U.S. stadium that provide different spectrums of light to ensure the best playing surface possible amid Kansas City’s rather volatile climate. The argument around women’s sports has always been about equity — a worthy one, too, Phillips said. But the Longs invested in women’s sports as investors, not as if it was a charity. NWSL teams that were trading for $2 million to $5 million three to five years ago are now being sold for between $60 million and $120 million. It’s good business.

“We haven’t had people giving that message before” to ticket buyers, viewers, sponsors and broadcasters, Phillips said. “There is value here.”

Within three years, the Current’s owners bought a team, moved it, organized it, rebranded it, constructed a training facility, then built and opened the first stadium specifically intended for a professional women’s sports team. And are winning.

While the Longs are moving women’s sports into the future, they haven’t forgotten its past. The text of Title IX is displayed on the wall of the hallway the players traverse from the locker room to the field. Any indication that the words are the Title IX law was left off; Angie Long wanted people to ask what they were from. Those same questions will be asked, then answered, about homages throughout the stadium to the 85ers, the first U.S. women’s national soccer team, a forgotten group of women who helped build the team most responsible for pushing women’s sports into the limelight, and whose members were at the Current’s inaugural CPKC Stadium match.

Maybe all that history washed over the athletic directors that February night, or maybe they were just focused on the most recent entry, this important stadium amid whose silence they stood.

“I know I’m in a moment of history, and that’s what my board felt,” said Phillips.