Set to open in the fall, Northwestern’s $862M Ryan Field touted as ‘best place to watch football in America’

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EVANSTON, Ill. — As Northwestern, fresh off a bowl win, wraps up its second season of playing football at a small lakefront field shared with the lacrosse and soccer teams, workers are busy building out a new $862 million football stadium in Evanston.

Beginning next season, the Wildcats, once the doormat of the Big Ten, may finally have home-field advantage over their conference rivals.

After nearly a century at the concrete stadium formerly known as Dyche, and two seasons at the temporary lakefront facility, Northwestern will christen what it believes to be the most fan-friendly major college football venue in the U.S. when the new Ryan Field opens in the fall.

“It’ll be the best place to watch a football game in America,” said Pat Ryan Jr., whose family drove the project and funded the majority of the money needed to build their namesake stadium.

Northwestern announced plans for the privately funded Ryan Field rebuild in 2022. The modern open-air stadium includes a canopy roof, better sight lines, chair backs instead of benches and 35,000 seats — 12,000 fewer than the old Ryan Field, which was demolished in 2024 after the Evanston City Council narrowly approved the project.

Unlike older stadiums, including its predecessor, newer construction technology allows seating levels that are steeper and closer to the field — a more intimate experience similar to a modern basketball arena.

The primary benefactor of the new stadium is insurance billionaire Patrick Ryan, founder and retired CEO of Aon Corp. and a Northwestern alumnus. The Ryan family donated $480 million in 2021 — the largest gift in Northwestern history — in large part to help build the stadium, and has since committed additional funding as the cost of the project has risen.

His son, Pat Ryan Jr., 58, a technology entrepreneur who holds a law and MBA degree from Northwestern, led the stadium redevelopment, navigating a contentious approval process that included calls to halt the ambitious project in the wake of a hazing scandal and July 2023 firing of the football team’s coach, Pat Fitzgerald.

In August, Northwestern reached a settlement agreement in a $130 million wrongful termination lawsuit brought by Fitzgerald, who was recently named the new head coach at Michigan State University.

Meanwhile, backed by the Ryan family’s funding, vision and tenacity, Northwestern’s $862 million football stadium — the most expensive in college sports — is coming to fruition.

“They could have walked away a dozen times and nobody would have blamed them,” Chicago-based sports business consultant Marc Ganis said. “This is not just a gift and a name. The Ryan family is the driving force behind every aspect of this building.”

In addition to football games, the new stadium will host up to six major concerts per year, an area of concern for some neighbors and community groups worried about increased noise and traffic.

But the national spotlight will be on a half-dozen or so Saturdays in the fall, when the new Ryan Field looks to transform college football for Northwestern, Evanston and what the university has branded — with mixed results — “Chicago’s Big Ten Team.”

Ganis said the new venue may help generate broader interest in a college football team that for years saw Big Ten opponents outdraw them in their own stadium.

“For Evanston and Northwestern, it’s a massive benefit,” Ganis said. “This will allow the teams that play in there to start being more competitive against their Big Ten brethren. It will also allow the teams to have a home-field advantage, which they have not had for a very long time.”

The most iconic college football stadiums are mostly century-old, massive concrete coliseums such as Ohio Stadium, Notre Dame Stadium and Michigan Stadium, the so-called Big House in Ann Arbor, which regularly draws more than 100,000 fans to watch the Wolverines play.

Northwestern’s predecessor facility, the crescent-shaped Dyche Stadium, was built in 1926 and renamed Ryan Field three decades ago when the family donated funds to renovate the interior.

It was already the smallest stadium in the Big Ten at 47,000 seats. Northwestern is getting smaller — in a big way — with the new 35,000-seat Ryan Field, which has a price tag higher than many NFL stadiums.

After winning City Council approval in November 2023, Northwestern demolished the old stadium and the football team relocated for the past two seasons to Martin Stadium, the lakefront home of the university’s soccer and lacrosse teams. Northwestern also played two home games at Wrigley Field this season.

The school broke ground in June 2024 on the new Ryan Field, which has risen up on the same footprint on Central Street, hovering over the iconic Mustard’s Last Stand hot dog joint to the south.

Topped off in October, the new stadium is actually 320,000 square feet larger than its predecessor. But eliminating bench seating and the upper-deck “nosebleed” level has created a more intimate setting, with fans closer to the field than at the century-old “cathedrals to college football,” Ryan said.

During a recent tour of the stadium construction, a blue-jeaned and hard-hatted Ryan navigated planks and temporary steel stairways to ascend to the two concourses and four seating levels, admiring the view of large cranes rumbling across the muddy future playing field below like behemoth fullbacks.

“The seats at the top of any stadium are the most expensive to build, the hardest to sell and the lowest fan satisfaction,” Ryan said, pointing to the nonexistent upper deck. “By getting rid of that, we were able to leverage the technology of steel and cantilevering and push everybody closer to the action.”

Another signature feature is the canopy roof over the seats, something more often associated with open-air soccer stadiums — including the new Chicago Fire venue going in on the city’s South Side.

Like a giant three-season porch, the canopy should make for an authentic fall football experience in relative comfort for most fans, Ryan said.

“The game is out in the elements on the field, but the canopy covers all the fans so that if the weather is bad, they’re protected,” Ryan said. “So it’s about protecting the fan while preserving the authenticity of the game.”

The new Ryan Field will have 200,000 square feet of festival grounds on the perimeter for tailgating, pop-up concessions and community activities.

Inside, the new stadium will also host up to six major commercial concerts per year — negotiated down from a proposed 10 to appease neighborhood opposition and win zoning approval. Northwestern was previously not allowed to hold concerts at the old stadium.

“This isn’t going to be a building that is built for seven Saturdays a year,” Ryan said. “It will be a year-round community asset.”

While year-round activation offers financial and cultural opportunities, those seven football Saturdays catalyzed the new Ryan Field, a potentially game-changing venue for Northwestern and the North Shore.

With four premium club areas, new amenities and unrivaled proximity to the action, the downsized Ryan Field is an “intelligent stadium” that should do equally well at drawing fans for a football game or a folk festival, Ganis said.

“They are building a right-sized building that will create the kind of game-day and event-day experience that should result in sellouts for virtually every event that takes place in the building,” Ganis said.

More broadly, Ryan Field is part of a once-in-a-century stadium renaissance in Chicago.

Announced in June, the Chicago Fire are building a 22,000-seat, open-air soccer stadium at The 78, a long-fallow megadevelopment planned for 62 acres along the Chicago River south of Roosevelt Road.

The privately funded $750 million stadium is slated to open in 2028.

In 2023, the Bears spent $197 million to buy the former Arlington International Racecourse to build a planned $2 billion domed stadium. But the team is still looking for more favorable long-term property tax rates and $855 million in public funding for infrastructure improvements.

The Bears recently threatened to move the new stadium across state lines to northwest Indiana without financial incentives from Illinois.

In 2024, the White Sox proposed a new publicly funded ballpark at The 78, but Springfield lawmakers balked at the idea of contributing a reported $1 billion to build it. The Cubs completed a $1 billion, five-year renovation of Wrigley Field in 2019.

The Fire and Northwestern stadium projects share similar scale, timing and open-air fields with canopy roofs. More importantly, both will not require public funding, increasingly the biggest impediment to building a new sports facility, Ganis said.

“These are gifts given to the community,” Ganis said. “The Ryan family deserves tremendous thanks and praise for what they’ve done here.”

As Northwestern’s largest donors, the Ryan family name adorns everything from nanotechnology and musical arts buildings to Welsh-Ryan Arena and the predecessor Ryan Field, which was renamed during a 1997 stadium renovation.

The family’s largesse extends beyond Northwestern as well, funding such projects as the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, an acclaimed rehabilitation facility in Chicago.

Not surprisingly, the new stadium has generated a lot more media attention than the nanotechnology building, Ryan said.

“We invest broadly in our philanthropy across the board,” Ryan said. “It’s just a high-profile one, because it’s a football stadium that ends up on television.”

Getting it across the finish line on time and on budget has been a challenge, with inflation raising construction costs and delays in governmental approvals pushing back demolition by several months, “eliminating any buffer,” Ryan said.

The Ryan family is covering any additional costs. Northwestern’s share of the project remains the equivalent of what the university would have spent to do needed renovation to the old stadium, Ryan said.

The new stadium is on target to “open at some point in the fall of 2026,” Ryan said, 100 years after Dyche Stadium hosted its first contest, a 34-0 Northwestern win over South Dakota. Whether the innovative Ryan Field ushers in a new era for college football stadiums remains to be seen.

“It is different than any stadium people have seen before,” Ryan said. “If we’re right, then you’ll see echoes of this in other buildings going forward. And if we’re wrong, well, it’ll be one of a kind.”

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