Tennessee Titans controlling shareholder Amy Adams Strunk
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The stadium agreement is a major win for Titans controlling shareholder Amy Adams Strunk.
The Tennessee Titans have reached an agreement with Nashville Mayor John Cooper to build a new, enclosed stadium at a cost of more than $2 billion.
The 1.7 million-square-foot stadium, to be built on land directly east of the existing Nissan Stadium, will have a dome, allowing it to host more concerts and other events, most importantly a Super Bowl, that the city has been eager to attract.
The Titans and the NFL will cover $840 million of the cost of the new stadium, plus any construction overruns, according to a press release from the mayor’s office. The state of Tennessee will kick in $500 million. The remaining $760 million will come from revenue bonds issued by the Metro Sports Authority. Those funds total $2.1 billion, though the city’s capital improvement budget earlier tallied the maximum cost at $2.2 billion.
Mayor Cooper made the announcement at a press conference this afternoon. The project, which had been the subject of heated negotiations for months, still must be approved by the Metro Council.
Building a new stadium is a huge win for Tennessee Titans controlling shareholder Amy Adams Strunk, 66, who has run the team since wresting control in a family scrum 2015. She is worth $1.6 billion from her 50% stake in the Titans and is one of a growing number of women who own NFL teams. (For more on Adams Strunk, see our September 2022 profile.) Forbes previously estimated that the new stadium could increase the Titans value by $300 million.
Adams Strunk’s father, Bud Adams, who died in 2013 at age 90, started the team that was then the Houston Oilders. In 1997, when Houston wouldn’t pony up cash to replace the aging Astrodome, he relocated the team to Nashville.
“When my father brought this team to Tennessee 25 years ago, I don’t think he could have imagined a better home for our organization,” Adams Strunk said in a statement today.
Adams Strunk has executed a dramatic turnaround of the Titans since taking charge. The value of the team has more than doubled since 2015, to $3.5 billion from $1.5 billion, as revenue reached $481 million, according to Forbes estimates. Even so, with the average NFL team now worth $4.5 billion and the Dallas Cowboys reaching a record $8 billion this year, the Titans are No. 27 of 32 on the list of most valuable NFL franchises.
She has spent money on new facilities and new uniforms, hosting a uniform reveal party that caught the attention of NFL brass. Three years ago, she brought the NFL draft to Nashville, with a massive party downtown, and has high hopes for hosting the Super Bowl, something that would only be possible with a new stadium.
To pay for their share of the stadium, the family will sell some of its other assets.
The new stadium, which will have a translucent roof and turf rather than grass, could be ready as early as the 2026 NFL season. Naming rights are said to be up for grabs.
In a statement, Nashville Mayor Cooper stressed that funds would come only from revenue streams designated specifically for the stadium, and not from the city’s general tax coffers. “The new stadium proposal protects Metro taxpayers by not spending a single dollar that could be spent elsewhere on our core priorities like education and public safety,” he said in the statement.
For more on Amy Adams Strunk, see our September 2022 profile.