Stadium building boom continues with two projects getting go ahead in Nashville and Calgary; Charlie Baker's media timeline and media market will assess women's sports rights
It was great to be in New York City for a day of meetings on Monday, a beautiful spring day. I'll be in New York all week next week, bringing people together to judge and make decisions, and vote on the Sports Business Awards. Always one of my favorite, more interesting weeks of the year. This is your morning Buzzcast for Wednesday, April 26th. Good morning, I'm Abe Madkour. Thanks for listening to the Buzzcast. Let's start around the building boom in sports, we've talked about a lot on the Buzzcast and it continues with two stories today.
First, the city of Nashville Tuesday night gave the final go ahead to proceed for a new stadium in the city for the Titans. This is one of the most talked about projects in all of sports business for various reasons. The location being in Nashville, Nashville is so hot right now. The feeling that Nashville could draw big global events in sports and host them at this facility. There's just a lot of buzz about this building, and it did get the final go ahead. This comes after plans on a stadium were first presented just last October. This moved very quickly. Now, the Titans will secure an architect, a construction manager, the Titans plan to speak with music industry officials to see what is needed to make the new stadium very music friendly and perfect for concerts.
They also plan to do additional outreach to fans about what they want to see in certain areas of the building. Now, construction is set to begin early next year, early 2024. It will cost roughly $2.1 billion. Capacity will be approximately 60,000, and the goal is to have the stadium open for the 2027 NFL season. The new stadium moving ahead in Nashville.
The building boom continues in Calgary, as the city of Calgary reached agreement with the government and the Flames to move forward on a $1.2 billion deal to replace the Saddledome. Now, these plans are incredibly light. There are no early designs of a building. There isn't even a timeline for construction of the building, but a deal was announced with the city, and the team, and the government to build the arena and build the arena alongside community rinks for amateur games and also practices for the Flames. It will also be a redeveloped public square, so there's some mixed use as well with this development. What's interesting is that the city of Calgary had an arena deal with the Flames in July of 2019. That broke down when the Flames walked away from that deal over rising costs.
But this deal with its $1.2 billion price tag would actually double the cost of the previous deal in 2019, but it does seem to be a better deal for the team, as the previous deal had a 50/50 split between the team and the city. This new agreement sees most of the costs covered by the municipal and provincial governments. Like I said, details are very light here, more details to come, but again, with Nashville, this marks the development of another new facility and we can add these facilities on to the building boom we've been seeing across the sports industry.
Let's move on. Next week, I'll be sitting down with RedBird Capital Partner's, Gerry Cardinale, one of the more interesting and active investors in sports, and I'm sure we will talk about the XFL, which he is a partner in with Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson and Danny Garcia. Now the numbers are in for the XFL's first season and it shows there is an audience for spring football, but it also shows that the numbers will likely need to improve to be a viable long-term sports property.
The XFL average just over 600,000 viewers over 40 regular season games. That's in its first season under RedBird Capital Partners led ownership. That includes Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson and Danny Garcia. While these numbers are steady, they are down from the XFLs iteration in the 2020 season right before Covid hit. During that time, the XFL averaged nearly 1.9 million viewers, so these numbers are down more than 65% from that 2020 season, which was under the ownership of Vince McMahon. Now, these XFL numbers saw a pretty clear decline toward the end of the season, as no XFL game topped a million in the last two weeks of the season, and a million viewers is clearly the number that the XFL and RedBird Capital were targeting. They ended up the season with just over 600,000 viewers on average. Now, we will watch how the XFL plans to move forward, but we will also see the numbers for the USFL, which started just a couple of weeks ago. We'll see how their numbers trend throughout that season, so interesting to see the numbers in spring football.
Let's move on to women's sports. New NCAA President Charlie Baker expects a decision regarding the future of the Women's Basketball Tournament to be made by the end of this year, by the end of December. Now, during a spring meeting of college leaders earlier this week, Charlie Baker said they think that taking the women's rights to the marketplace can be the right thing and also a smart business move. He called the ability to take the women's tournament rights to the marketplace on its own "A giant opportunity," and he said quote, "We better not blow it." Currently, the NCAA Women's Basketball Tournament is part of a bundle with the other sports that is bought by ESPN at at roughly $34 million per year. As we have noted, the NCAA will remove the Women's Basketball Tournament from that bundle, take that to the marketplace.
The NCAA has hired Endeavor to help it determine whether the tournament should remain in that bundle or be sold separately. They haven't made a formal, final decision to sell it separately. I believe they will, but they do have optionality here if the marketplace doesn't respond to the figure they want with the Women's Basketball Tournament as a standalone property, or if the value of the bundle of the other events is more lucrative for the NCAA. Decisions to be made, decisions likely will be made by the end of this year. This year and the next year is going to be a true test of the women's sports marketplace. As the Wall Street Journal had a really smart story that noted over the next few years, we're going to see the media rights hit the market for the WNBA, the NWSL, like I said, the Women's College Basketball Tournament, and FIFA's Women's World Cup.
That will give us all a really strong indicator of what the media companies think about the value of women's sports rights and its ability to deliver viewers. The Wall Street Journal cited sources who believe that FIFA is projecting the value of media rights for its Women's World Cup to be more than 300 million. That's the first time I've ever seen that figure. We know that the WNBA will be seeking a record deal worth more than a hundred million dollars a year after its current agreement with ESPN expires at the end of the 2025 season. We know that the NWSL is in the marketplace now. They are in the final year of a deal with CBS and that's worth about $1.5 million a year. They are certainly looking for a major increase in their rights fees. All this comes at a very interesting time as media companies are facing tough decisions about what to spend on, and we're seeing a real belt tightening among the media companies out there. These next few years will be a very interesting indicator on the value of women's sports rights.
I want to touch on something that may have been overlooked, some interesting news coming from the global soccer marketplace, as UEFA said, it is considering hosting its Champions League final in a US market as soon as 2026. Those were according to comments by UEFA President Aleksander Čeferin. Even the fact, just the fact that UEFA has discussed this option has to be considered a big surprise, because it would be a major coup to have this event on US soil, especially around the World Cup, which of course will be in 26 and the US, Canada, and Mexico. This year's Champions League final will be held in Istanbul, London will host it in '24, Munich will be the site of '25. Čeferin said that after that event in Munich, "Anything is possible," and such a move would mark the first time the Champions League's final game would be held outside of Europe.
So this would be a major move. If it does happen. UEFA's Čeferin praised the US market. He said that he had been very encouraged by recent viewership for the European Cup and Champions League and just overall soccer engagement in the country. Certainly, bringing a Champions League final to the US would accelerate interest and growth of soccer in this marketplace. I want to end on one thing that I know my colleague David Albright mentioned on a previous Buzzcast earlier this week, but there was a major move in the sports agency world that does bear repeating in case you missed it. We all know about the big agency's endeavor in CAA Sports, Octagon, Excel, and so many others. But one of the most powerful and largest agencies in all of Hollywood is UTA, United Talent Agency. They are now looking to make an even more pronounced investment and focus in the sports business, and so that's worth noting.
They named the agency's Chief Operating Officer, Andrew Thau, as its co-head of UTA Sports, alongside with agent Rich Paul, who of course is agent to LeBron James. This marks a major move for UTA, as it will be an aggressive player in the sports business. Now, we know that Rich Paul has led UTA sports since the division launched in 2019, but now the move of bringing Thau over to co-run sports with Rich Paul shows UTA has a greater interest and a greater commitment to the sports business. I could see them looking at other areas of the sports business to invest in or build out, could be media consulting, could be executive search, could be around sales efforts, but they are shaping up or want to be a major player in sports business. They'll do that through acquisition or building out existing departments.
The bottom line is UTA has big ambitions, big aspirations. They have the resources and now they bring in Andrew Thau in a co-head role that will expedite their efforts. Now, Thau is known around Hollywood. He's been at UTA since 2007. He was a former executive at 20th Century Fox. He will maintain his existing responsibilities overseeing United Talent Agency's corporate and legal affairs, while also serving as co-head of UTA sports. A very interesting move in the entertainment agency world with Andrew Thau becoming co-head of UTA Sports. That is your morning Buzzcast for Wednesday, April 26th. I'm Abe Madkour. Thanks for listening to the Buzzcast. Thanks for spreading the word on the Buzzcast. Stay healthy, be good to each other. I'll speak to you tomorrow.