The Browns are leaving the lake. Haslam Sports Group broke ground on Huntington Bank Field, a new domed stadium in Brook Park that will be Ohio’s first fully enclosed venue and the team’s home starting with the 2029 season. A joint venture of AECOM Hunt and Turner Construction is building it, with HKS as the architect.
The move trades one of the NFL’s most exposed sites, the wind off Lake Erie, for a fixed roof and a year-round building. That’s the real logic behind the dome. An open-air football stadium hosts maybe a dozen dates a year. An enclosed one can chase Final Fours, major conventions, concerts, and the kind of winter programming Cleveland’s lakefront could never hold.
Why a dome, and why Brook Park
Brook Park sits near the airport, southwest of downtown, and the site gives the team room for parking and the mixed-use development that increasingly comes bundled with a modern stadium deal. The economics of these projects rarely pencil on football alone, which is why owners keep pushing for roofs and adjacent real estate. The AECOM Hunt and Turner team has the enclosed-venue résumé to deliver a long-span roof over an NFL bowl, a structurally demanding piece that drives both the schedule and the budget.
A busy few years for stadium builders
The groundbreaking adds to a crowded stadium pipeline. Nashville is well into its own domed build at New Nissan Stadium, Miami is building a stadium district around Inter Miami CF at Miami Freedom Park, and the roster of NFL, MLS and college venues under construction keeps the country’s big sports-builder JVs booked. For Cleveland, the clock now runs to 2029, and a fixed-roof stadium leaves little slack in the schedule for the roof structure that defines it.