There aren’t many NFL stadiums under construction in 2026, which is part of what makes the Brook Park job notable. The Cleveland Browns held the formal groundbreaking on the new Huntington Bank Field on April 30, with owners Jimmy and Dee Haslam joined by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine. The build is a $2.4 billion enclosed stadium designed by HKS, constructed by an AECOM Hunt / Turner Construction joint venture with Independence Construction, and targeted to open for the 2029 season.
Enabling work began in October 2025. Mass excavation started on March 2 of this year, and the official ceremonial start last month puts the project squarely into vertical work next. HKS released full renderings in February.
What’s actually different about this stadium
A few things separate this build from a typical NFL replacement. First, the stadium sits 80 feet below grade. That’s not a stylistic choice — it’s a hard FAA constraint tied to the site’s proximity to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, which limits how tall the structure can rise. Sinking the bowl gets the seating capacity HKS wanted without breaking the airport’s surface zones.
Second, the roof is transparent. HKS specified a folded-plate structural skin in a clear, lightweight polymer — engineered to handle Cleveland snow loads while keeping the bowl daylit. It’s a custom system, not an off-the-shelf ETFE roof, and the structural connections to the offset cantilever trusses will be one of the more interesting engineering details to follow as steel goes up.
Capacity sits at 67,500 for football and scales to roughly 75,000 for concerts and other major events. The “Grand Concourse” — a continuous main and upper concourse loop — is being pitched as the largest in the NFL, with direct outdoor plaza connections that the team’s marketing keeps calling “open-air feel.” That phrasing aside, the venue is fully enclosed.
The money and the politics
The price tag has been the louder story locally. Total project cost runs $2.4 billion for the stadium and another $1 billion for the surrounding mixed-use district — call it $3.4 billion all-in. Public participation lands above $800 million between the state of Ohio and the city of Brook Park. The Haslam Sports Group covers the rest.
Whether that ratio holds up to inflation through 2029 is an open question. Stadium projects from this generation have all run hot — SoFi, Allegiant, Highmark — and the public-private split tends to drift toward more public exposure when the developer hits cost overruns. The Browns project pre-funds a contingency, but six years of construction on a job this size means at least one renegotiation moment.
Tier-one structural and MEP subs haven’t been publicly named yet. Given the AECOM Hunt / Turner pairing and the project’s scale, expect the curtain-wall and long-span steel packages to draw bids from the same shortlist that worked on SoFi and Allegiant. The folded-roof system, in particular, is going to be a fabrication challenge worth tracking when the bid awards come out later this year.