The billionaire owner of the Chicago Fire FC has agreed to spend $650 million of his own money to bankroll a 22,000-seat, soccer-only stadium on the vacant South Loop parcel known as “The 78,” but tens of millions of public dollars would be needed to ready the long-dormant site for development.
Joe Mansueto, founder and chairperson of Morningstar, a Chicago-based financial services firm, described the open-air arena he hopes to complete and open in time for the 2028 season as “more than just a stadium.”
It’ll be a place for “fans of all ages, backgrounds and neighborhoods to celebrate the beautiful game” that is soccer “right in the heart of our city,” Mansueto said in a full-page advertisement that ran in Tuesday’s Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune. “Soccer is the world’s game and a world-class city like ours deserves a world-class club with a world-class home to match.”
Mansueto, a native Chicagoan who appears on the Forbes list of 400 richest Americans, has spent the last few months weighing a move to one of two mega-development sites stuck in neutral: the 62-acre site at Roosevelt and Clark known as The 78, and the massive North Side parcel known as Lincoln Yards.
He ultimately chose to build the stadium — slated to be designed by the world-renowned Gensler architectural firm — at The 78 in part because it’s the political path of least resistance.
A soccer stadium is already a permitted use at The 78. At Lincoln Yards, it would have required an amendment to the parcel’s planned development documents, which could have resurrected a heated debate mirroring what happened under former Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
That’s when Ald. Brian Hopkins (2nd) opposed the soccer stadium floated by Lincoln Yards developer Sterling Bay under pressure from the owners of North Side music venues. Also complicating the 53-acre Lincoln Yards site is the question about who owns the land, part of which was recently transferred to an Arkansas bank.
Many projects planned at The 78, none built.
The 78 has no such complications. At 62 acres stretching south to 16th Street, it is one of Chicago’s largest undeveloped parcels — and the most strategically located. But it has eluded development for decades.
Once owned by convicted political power broker Tony Rezko, it’s been under consideration for Amazon’s second world headquarters, a new corporate headquarters for United Airlines, for the home of JPMorganChase and for a Chicago casino now planned for the River West neighborhood.
The push to locate those projects at The 78 never got past the drawing board. Neither did a plan to build a new White Sox ballpark at The 78, and perhaps even shoehorn in a domed stadium for the Bears on the same site.
The University of Illinois’ $300 million technology and research hub known as Discovery Partners Institute was once planned for The 78, but is now envisioned for the Illinois Quantum & Microelectronics Park on the site of the shuttered U.S. Steel South Works plant.
Those development defeats created the opportunity that Mansueto is seizing to realize his longstanding dream of owning and controlling his own stadium.
“It’s about investing in Chicago — not just on match days, but every day as a committed community partner,” Mansueto said in the ad published Tuesday.
The 78’s losing streak set the stage for developer and land owner Related Midwest and its CEO, Curt Bailey, to take advantage of Mansueto’s offer to build his own stadium.
“We were absolutely prepared for how an anchor would work on the site…The work that we have done working on giant anchor sites over the last seven to eight years really prepared us so that we kind of had every T crossed and every I dotted as to how we could move quickly to build a great facility,” Bailey said.
“When you have an owner like Joe Mansueto that is really focused on playing a game in that stadium in 2028, speed to market, ability to execute is very, very important to them…That confluence of events and our preparedness — it was just the right time and the right partner.”
Fire’s Soldier Field lease due to expire soon
Mansueto could not be reached for comment. The Chicago Sun-Times receives funding from the Mansueto Foundation.
In recent months, Mansueto told Crain’s Chicago Business that he is “not comfortable taking public money,” so he is willing to dig deep into his own pockets instead of continuing to see his team share Soldier Field with the Bears — and being at the scheduling and sponsorship mercy of the Chicago Park District.
The Fire’s Soldier Field lease is due to expire this year. It requires Mansueto’s team to pay a minimum of $145,000 for operating expenses for games with 15,000 attendees or fewer. The sliding fee scale rises to $162,500 for up to 20,000 fans, and $258,000 for any crowd larger than 35,000.
Last year, average home attendance for Fire games at Soldier Field was 21,327. This year’s April 13 match against Inter Miami attracted a crowd of 62,358, the highest home attendance mark in the history of the Fire.
The team intends to exercise options to extend its Soldier Field lease in hopes of beginning construction of the new stadium this fall or early next year, and opening its new home in time for the 2028 Major League Soccer regular season.
Mansueto’s willingness to bankroll stadium construction makes him an outlier among Chicago sports moguls who in the past have routinely looked for public handouts and property tax breaks.
Still, a formidable city subsidy would be needed to cover major infrastructure costs at the long dormant site.
A new road built by the Chicago Department of Transportation, the Wells-Wentworth connector, already runs through the 62-acre site even though it has never been used.
The nine-acre stadium site also has mass transit access — the nearby Roosevelt station serves the CTA’s Red, Green and Orange lines — that could reduce the need for stadium parking. With the Chicago River just west of the site, there’s also the possibility of water taxi service for game-day crowds.
But there are railroad tracks that need to be relocated and a crumbling seawall that needs to be rebuilt. Water, sewer and power lines need to be installed, and parking garages and surface lots need to be built. So does the last leg of the Riverwalk between Lake Street and Ida B. Wells Drive that had an initial price tag of $140 million.
What the ask for taxpayer money might be
Related Midwest hopes to draw from the $450 million tax-increment financing district approved seven years ago to bankroll the infrastructure needed to prepare the site for development.
Bailey said he was still working on what the final infrastructure plan will look like and how large of a TIF subsidy Mayor Brandon Johnson and the City Council will be asked to authorize amid the rising cost of construction materials tied to President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
“Whether it’s a widget, a yard of road or whatever it is, it is significantly more today…But we are changing what we’re doing on the site,” Bailey said. “There is the opportunity to have a reduction in the existing TIF, and that’s what we’re working towards…The good news is we think we should be able to have a significant reduction in the amount of our TIF” from the original amount of $450 million.
The public improvements are needed to unlock the potential of a site that Bailey hopes will someday include thousands of residential units, many of them designated as affordable, along with entertainment and commercial elements.
Without the soccer stadium as a catalyst, The 78 could easily continue to sit vacant, just as it did when Rezko owned it.
Rezko’s partner in the South Loop land deal was Nadhmi Auchi, an Iraqi-British billionaire living in London who was once convicted by a French court of fraud in an oil scandal. He was fined and sentenced to prison for 15 months, though the sentence was suspended and he never did any time in that case.
Senior mayoral adviser Jason Lee, Johnson’s point man on stadium issues, refused to say what level of city subsidy the mayor was willing to seek on Related Midwest’s behalf.
Johnson reacted to news of Mansueto’s plans, saying: “While it is still too early to say what the final deal might look like, it is a good sign for our city whenever someone wants to invest more than $600 million in a new development. We look forward to continued conversations with the Fire and the community to make sure that this investment benefits local residents and our city as a whole. If the community is supportive, the Chicago Fire would be an excellent anchor tenant for the 78 site.”
Bailey once dreamed of luring both the Sox and the Bears to The 78. He has now turned his gaze to the Fire, which has a far greater likelihood of actually happening.
Without the stadium catalyst, Bailey acknowledged that the 78 is likely to lay fallow for decades to come.
“We identified very early that the only way for this to work was with a significant anchor,” he said. “Which is why we’ve had this, I would say, quixotic pursuit of all of these [other] projects over the last eight years.”