Mixed-Use Development, Capital Stacks, and the Next Wave of Sports Real Estate
This past week, I sat down with Matt Dale on the Momentous Sports Podcast.
Matt is Executive Vice President at Four Stones, the commercial development platform wholly owned by Andrew Cathy, the current CEO of Chick-fil-A. Before joining Four Stones, Matt spent over a decade leading project management on some of the most ambitious sports infrastructure projects in the country, including Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. He also grew his own project management firm, Impact, from three people to over 65 before making the move to the developer side.
In this conversation, we get into the real mechanics of sports-anchored mixed-use development, early project challenges, and where developers are focusing their attention next.
The Parking Lot Was Never the Business
For 70 years, the stadium was treated as the product.
Get people in, serve them, get them out.
The surrounding land was an afterthought, and in some cities, actively harmful to the neighborhoods it landed next to.
That model didn't fail because of bad intentions. It failed because the economics were incomplete. A franchise generating revenue eight to fifteen times a year, on land it doesn't control (or more, depending on the sport), is leaving an enormous amount of value dormant.
The teams that figured this out restructured the entire business model around one insight: the calendar matters more than the scoreboard.
What the Battery Got Right
Truist Park and the Battery Atlanta are the benchmarks everyone points to. Matt has been close to it. Here's what actually drives it:
Battery Avenue is fully pedestrian, with the stadium gate visible from every point on the main drag. The energy is there on a Tuesday in March, not just game days.
Every tenant is a one-off, locally rooted concept. No chains. The kind of place people seek out on its own merits.
A permanent stage and open lawn near the stadium create a reason to arrive early, stay late, and come back when there's no game.
The Braves had a tough season this past year. The Battery barely felt it. When the ecosystem is right, the district develops its own gravity. The team becomes a catalyst, not a dependency.
One honest limitation: a second avenue in the development has underperformed, not because of bad tenants, but because people follow each other. If the design doesn't pull foot traffic intentionally, guests miss half the district. That lesson travels.
Sports-Anchored vs. Everything Else
A traditional mixed-use development draws from a defined radius.
However, a sports-anchored district draws from a city, a state, or sometimes an entire region.
Matt used the term Braves Nation. When the nearest comparable team is hundreds of miles away, you're not serving a neighborhood. You're serving a fanbase with no alternative.
The tenant mix has to reflect both realities.
Game days need restaurants, experiential retail, and entertainment that can absorb 40,000 people at once.
The other 300-plus days need residential, office, hospitality, and retail that stand alone. Retail in these districts also tends to run on percentage rent, meaning as sales grow, so do payments. It aligns everyone's incentives in a way traditional net leases don't.
What Developers Most Often Get Wrong
There is no shortage of capital paying attention to this space. What's scarce is the ability to execute.
Matt described a pattern he saw repeatedly: a developer with land, capital, and a beautiful rendering, but no entitlements, no pricing validation, no design team properly engaged. Multiple redesign cycles. Contractor market exhausted. Basis upside down before a shovel hits the ground.
The rendering is not the deal. The rendering is the vision.
The projects that succeed assemble the right team early, run real pre-development discipline, and build something that fits their specific market. We hear regularly from groups that want to replicate the Battery. The answer is always the same: you don't want the Battery. You want the version that fits your city, your fanbase, and your brand. The projects that copy rather than contextualize almost always underperform.
Capital, Rates, and Why Timing is Everything
The capital stack in these projects is split:
Stadium component: Typically financed with long-dated fixed-rate public debt, tax-exempt bonds, and tax allocation districts. Insulated from rate volatility.
Surrounding mixed-use: Financed conventionally. Much more sensitive to rate cycles.
Rising rates don't kill sports districts. They reshape them. Office becomes residential. Retail gets re-scoped. Phases get delayed. The public momentum keeps the core moving, but the risk is that the stadium gets built, the reveal happens, and the district arrives late or undersized. You've spent the moment.
The third variable is the league cycle. Strong media rights and franchise stability underwrite long-term district demand even when near-term leasing softens. What makes sports different from any other anchor tenant: the team isn't just a tenant. It's a political influencer, a credit enhancer, and often the development partner itself.
U.S. Soccer’s Generational Bet
Four Stones is roughly 90 days from handing over the keys to the U.S. Soccer Federation's new National Training Center in Fayetteville, Georgia.
The numbers:
200 acres of developed campus
200,000 square foot training facility with a 110,000 square foot indoor pitch
15 locker rooms and high-performance classrooms
15 to 16 outdoor fields, including beach and futsal courts
350 to 400 full-time staff on site at full operation
Hosting 27 national teams, from senior programs down to U-14, for roughly 40 weeks of camps per year
Until now, the Federation never had a home. National teams rotated through approved sites across the country, none purpose-built for that use. The response since breaking ground has been immediate. Medical research groups, sports science facilities, and hospitality operators have all approached Four Stones about proximity to the campus.
Build the infrastructure the market has been waiting for, and the surrounding development follows.
Where the Next Waves Are
Three areas crossing our desk with increasing frequency:
Minor league baseball. Smaller markets, flexible land, and fans hungry for the same destination experience that major league cities have been building. The proof of concept exists. The replication is underway.
USL and lower-tier soccer. The league recently attracted significant institutional investment at the league level. Demographic tailwinds from the World Cup, the Olympics, and youth participation rates make this a structurally growing sport in underserved markets.
D1 collegiate development. With revenue sharing now funneling significant dollars annually to athletes at major programs, universities are rethinking their real estate. Public-private partnerships wrapping student housing, hospitality, and retail around stadium-adjacent land are moving from concept to pipeline. Wake Forest announced a $250 million project around their stadium late last year.
Youth sports tournament campuses. These facilities run 40-plus weekends a year. Families drive hours. Kids have six-hour windows between games with nowhere to go. The demand is there. The supply is not. That gap is closing faster than most people expect.
The Takeaway
The shift from an isolated venue to an integrated district is a structural correction. The old model left too much on the table for too long, and the market is beginning to reflect that.
What our partnership with Four Stones reflects is exactly this: the skills required to do this well don't live in one firm.
Identifying the right team, market, league cycle, capital structure, and development philosophy has to happen together and early. The projects that define this space over the next decade will go to the groups that assemble those pieces before the shovel goes in the ground.
The rendering is not the deal. The team is.
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