While Northwestern has played its home games this season in its lacrosse stadium and at Wrigley Field, the Wildcats will have an $850 million stadium of their own in just a couple of years.
On Monday, Northwestern unveiled the first look at its new Ryan Field, which is set to open in 2026. The new stadium comes with a price tag of $850 million, making it the most expensive stadium ever built for a college sports team.
The new Ryan Field, which is being funded primarily by its namesake Ryan family, will only hold 35,000 people – giving it the Big Ten’s smallest capacity – but will be a state-of-the-art facility designed to maximize the fan experience. Per Northwestern’s news release, all 35,000 seats will offer “better-than-TV sightlines” by leveraging modern engineering so that each level of the stadium is designed to be as close to the field as possible.
"Our worst seat in this stadium is 100 feet closer to the field than the most expensive seat at the Big House," Pat Ryan Jr. told ESPN. "You're building things up and cantilevering them over instead of going out. It's structurally much more challenging from an engineering perspective, but you've got to create better-than-TV sightlines."
Ryan told ESPN that Lower.com Field, the home of the Columbus Crew, served as an inspiration for the design of the new Ryan Field.
"A lot of people look at first-of-its-kind and say, 'Oh, it's just a mini NFL stadium,' but it's really something specific for college," Ryan told ESPN. "Every college we've seen has said, 'We know we need to think about doing something like this, but somebody needed to go first.' Everybody else is saying, 'We're going to watch closely, and if it works, we'll come see it.'"
The new Ryan Field will be by far the most expensive stadium ever built specifically for college football, surpassing the previous high price tag for a new stadium of $310 million for San Diego State’s Snapdragon Stadium, which opened in 2022. That said, Northwestern plans to host events at the facility year-round and projects that the stadium will have a $1.3 billion impact on the Chicago area with $659 million of impact in Evanston alone.
Ohio State is scheduled to play its first game at the new Ryan Field in 2027. The Buckeyes will host Northwestern at Ohio Stadium in 2026 for its next game against the Wildcats after earning a 31-7 win over Northwestern at Wrigley Field this past weekend.
