After the plan to renovate Nissan Stadium hit a snag when unforeseen issues arose that doubled the original estimate from $600 million to $1.2 billion, the Tennessee Titans and the city of Nashville shifted their focus to building a brand new stadium.
While speaking at a Metro Sports Authority board meetings on Thursday, Titans president Burke Nihill said the team is moving “wisely but with a sense of urgency” in their attempt to build a new stadium, with Nihill believing the new venue can open by 2026, per The Tennessean.
“We’re trying to move wisely but with a sense of urgency,” Nihill said. “There’s a path forward that, if we have alignment by the fall, we could have a new stadium open (by 2026). It’s aggressive, but we believe it’s in play.”
Nihill noted that striking a deal for a new stadium could take up to a year, and construction would take about two-and-a-half years after that.
The Titans president also went into detail about the downside of Tennessee’s current stadium, which opened in 1999 and was built for $292 million.
“This is a very basic building in the eyes of the NFL,” Nihill said of Nissan Stadium. “This is one of the bottom 20 percent of buildings in the NFL built before 9/11. Security enhancements adopted by the NFL haven’t been added.”
It isn’t exactly clear how much it’ll cost to build a brand new stadium. Recently-built NFL venues such as SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles and Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas cost $5.5 and $1.9 billion, respectively.
We tend to believe it’ll cost somewhere in the ballpark of $2 billion, but that’s just us guessing. If that comes to fruition, building a new venue at that price seems like the better option when considering how much the renovations would ultimately cost.
