Florentino Pérez will build New York City’s first soccer stadium

The New York City Football Club (NYCFC) will finally have its own soccer stadium. The club has selected HOK as architect and Turner Construction Company, an ACS Group company headed by Florentino Pérez —the president of Spanish soccer team Real Madrid —, as general contractor to design and build New York City’s first major soccer-specific stadium. Until now, the team had played its games in smaller venues and American football stadiums.

Willets Point, the Queens site chosen to house the project, is one of New York’s sports hubs. Located north of the former 1964 World’s Fair grounds and connected to Manhattan by subway, the area already counts with the New York Mets baseball stadium and the National Tennis Center, where the U.S. Open is held.

The entire project is valued at $780 million. The work is expected to be completed for the club to play in its new stadium in the 2027 Major League Soccer season.

“The Club is confident that HOK and Turner will successfully deliver the Club’s vision for a world-class 25,000-seat stadium that will become a community resource. NYCFC is proud to work with Queens Development Group (QDG) to bring forward a once-in-a-generation project for Willets Point that will include 2,500 units of 100 percent affordable housing, a 650-seat new public school, a hotel, open space, and NYCFC’s fully privately financed stadium,” the club said in a statement.

HOK and Turner are regular business allies who have completed more than 400 projects together over the past half century. They have completed large-scale projects spanning corporate, healthcare, science and technology, and sports and leisure facilities.

“We are honored to be a part of the team building the new home for NYCFC. The stadium will elevate the experience for this incredible team and their fans,” said Turner vice president and general manager Charlie Whitney. “From the very beginning of our involvement, we understood the importance of this project and the positive impact and transformation it will bring to the entire community.”

Turner Construction has a specific division specializing in sports construction. Its clients include professional soccer, American football, baseball, field hockey and basketball teams. Turner has worked on many of the world’s leading sports venues, including TQL Stadium, SoFi Stadium, Lower.com Field, Golden 1 Center, Yankee Stadium, Madison Square Garden, Levi’s Stadium and the Intuit Dome. The company has “earned a reputation for safe, efficient project management and innovative solutions to complex challenges,” said the club.

Early last November, Turner announced that the Buffalo Bills (Buffalo, New York) had awarded the construction of their future stadium to a consortium formed by Turner, Gilbane and Group 34. Although the official announcements did not specify the amount, the specialized media put it at US$1.4 billion.

ACS’ largest market

The United States has stood out as ACS’s main market. In 2022, the company brought in revenues of over $20 billion from business in the U.S., 27% more than the previous year and 56% of the group’s total turnover, according to recent figures. It is also the Spanish construction and infrastructure group with the largest presence in the country, ahead of Ferrovial, which has just approved a transfer of its headquarters to the Netherlands.

In 2022, ACS was awarded the construction of the 16.2-mile light rail line extending from Bethesda to New Carrollton, in Maryland, for about $1.4 billion, through Dragados USA. It also won, through its subsidiary Pulice, a contract for the widening and improvement of the IH35 highway in Travis County (Texas), for some $725 million. The same subsidiary won the construction of a 12.2 mile toll facility in Hidalgo County (Texas) for some $275 million.

At the end of last year, Picone was awarded a $371 million contract for the installation of a combination of retaining walls and deployable barriers to protect infrastructure and reduce the risk of flooding from the Brooklyn Bridge to Montgomery Street in New York. Flatiron, also a subsidiary of the group, won the project to improve the safety of the chemical and disinfection systems at the Orinda water treatment plant (California), for $294 million. Turner was awarded the construction of the new health education building on the Lexington campus of the University of Kentucky for $247 million.

With these contracts and many other smaller ones won by its various subsidiaries, ACS’s portfolio in the United States amounted to almost $37 billion, half of the group’s total, at the close of 2022.

So far this year, the group has won important contracts in the country, including a contract from Dragados USA for the construction of a concrete dry dock at Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam in Hawaii for $2.84 billion, and the construction for Panasonic of a battery manufacturing plant for electric vehicles in De Soto, Kansas, in a project involving a total investment of $4 billion.

This last contract corresponds to Turner, the main ACS subsidiary in the country, which is the one that has now won the stadium contract and which also announced in February that it will build a facility to produce active pharmaceutical ingredients in Frederick (north of Denver, Colorado) for 725 million dollars. At the start of the year, Turner also won a $73 million project to build a university residence in British Columbia (Canada) and another $85 million project for a building on the Fort Worth campus in Texas, both in consortium with other firms. At the beginning of the year, work began on the construction of a resort complex with an indoor water park in Mashantucket (Connecticut) for some $300 million.

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