🔒Hearts of Pine unveil plan to build $50M soccer stadium in Portland

With 8,000 fans on the season ticket waitlist for Portland Hearts of Pine games at Fitzpatrick Stadium, the soccer club plans to build a permanent home in a project expected to cost more than $50 million, the team announced Tuesday. The stadium, to be built on industrial waterfront land on the peninsula's southwestern edge, at Cassidy Point, that the team is buying from Sprague Energy. The stadium is expected to seat 9,000 to 11,000 fans. That compares with 5,500 seats at the city-owned Fitzpatrick Stadium, which can accommodate about 6,200 fans with additional seating and food areas. Construction is slated to begin in 2027, with an opening targeted for early 2029. In the meantime, the team — whose season runs from April through October —  plans to continue using Fitzpatrick Stadium until the move. The project will be funded primarily through private sources as the team courts additional investors, according to Hearts of Pine President Kevin Schohl. “As we finalize the design of the stadium and understand what the city wants us to do in terms of the zoning, we’ll have a better understanding of overall construction costs, and we’ll be talking to banks about loans and new potential equity investors,” Schohl told Mainebiz in a phone interview. “We’ve already had a lot of excitement and demand from potential investors in the club, and we would expect that to increase even more with this project,” he added. While a project team has not yet been named, SMRT Architects & Engineers drafted initial concepts and renderings to help the Hearts with "dreaming the dream," Schohl said.

Industrial site

The team, founded in 2023 by former soccer player Gabe Hoffman-Johnson, did not disclose the cost of the land, a former coal storage site at the southwestern end of Portland's peninsula. Located at the end of Commercial Street, the site is adjacent to the Veterans Memorial Bridge and overlooks the Fore River estuary. Since last year’s inaugural season kickoff, the team has sold out every home match at Fitzpatrick Stadium, often affectionately referred to as “Fitzy.” The team is also proceeding with plans to launch a pre-professional women’s team in 2027 as part of the USL W League.

The proposed project would transform the fenced-off industrial property that for decades has been used for coal storage. An ordinance adopted last year by the Portland City Council requires large coal stockpiles to be permanently removed from the site. In addition, the squad aims to convert one of the industrial buildings on the site into an indoor soccer facility for youth and adult teams to use in the winter, according to Schohl.

Hearts of Pine said it will work with civic leaders and neighboring property owners to ensure the stadium complements the western waterfront.

'Accelerated' search

The site's 600-foot pier will remain zoned for marine industrial use and is not part of the stadium plan, while other parts of the property will be redeveloped, opening a section of the riverfront that has long been inaccessible to the public. Hearts of Pine said the project will benefit from the real estate experience of Redfern Properties' Jonathan and Catherine Culley, two of the club's founding partners, who have spent several years searching for the best place to build a permanent home. “We always knew that we were going to need a permanent home, but the success of the team last year really caused us to accelerate that timeline,” Jonathan Culley told Mainebiz in a Monday phone interview. While the team had considered 13 potential sites, including locations in Westbrook and South Portland, he said “we felt an in-town setting was an important part of our identity, and that recreating the atmosphere at Fitzpatrick Stadium would have been difficult in the suburbs. “We didn’t want to lose that magic,” he noted.