If all goes according to plan, in a few years, the future of Toronto’s sports teams will be a new home. Today, ve Vractive Media – the proprietary group behind the Toronto Defense Overwatch League and Call on duty The league’s Toronto Ultra – announces plans for a new, 1,000,000-seat venue in the city, designed to host both competitive gaming matches and other events such as concerts. The venue is expected to cost about 500 500 million to build and open in 2025.
The new arena will be located at Toronto’s Exhibition Place, also home to BMO Field, where soccer club Toronto FC plays. It is being designed by renowned architecture firm behind recent projects such as Populus, London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium and T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas. “The design of the theater was conceived as neither a sports arena nor an opera house, but rather a new typology that makes both advanced: a state-of-the-art performance venue,” popular lead designer Jonathan Malli said in a statement. “Theatrical architecture merges old and new.”
The planned venue is far from the first sports area – in other existing venues, this Overwatch The league’s Philadelphia Fusion is also planning to build a small home base – but that points to an ongoing trend. Organizations and leagues are looking for new ways to make money, simply by moving their businesses beyond professional teams, especially through apparel and content.
But a place like this presents something more ambitious. While the sports teams will be anchors, like the traditional playing field, the goal is to keep the building packed on a night basis. Oraactive says it hosts more than 200 events a year, and is expected to include “big city-wide conventions, corporate events and product launches and award shows,” in addition to sports and concerts. The company, meanwhile, also says it is “already in active discussion to attract some of the world’s biggest sporting events.”
