SBJ Facilities: Setting a legendary standard for premium service

The Wall Street Journal recently published a story with the headline, “The Sphere looked like a disaster. It’s become a huge hit instead.”

Sphere Entertainment turned a $33.4 million profit in 2025 after losing $325 million the previous year, and its share price jumped from $27.25 in April 2025 to $136.83 a year later. I’m still curious about The Sphere’s long-term prospects, especially given the capital intensity to build one. But the most interesting item in the story is that artists are adapting their processes and the music and live performances they’re creating to take advantage of The Sphere’s technological capabilities. That’s an innovation.

I’ll close here with a survey question: If you could see any musical act or film at The Sphere, who would it be? Send me an email and let me know.

Pawel Brzezinski remembers an email he received from a customer who had stayed at a Paris hotel under Brzezinski’s purview during his time as COO of hospitality holding company Jean-Georges Management.

While attending to the the family’s hotel room when they were out, a staff member noticed a little girl’s stuffed animal’s ripped ear. Before the family returned, the ear was repaired, and staff had taken photos of the stuffed animal with Paris landmarks, then compiled them in a photo album left on the freshly made bed next to the toy.

“That experience created such a moment for that little girl and that entire family,” Brzezinski said. “They keep laughing that their budget is broken because they are constantly dining at all Jean-Georges properties across the world.”

Why am I telling you this story? Because Brzezinski recently joined Legends Global as its new EVP of Premium Hospitality Experience, and it’s that standard he ingested while working for the famed French chef, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, that inspires his guest service ideal.

Is that level of attention and effort possible in the bustling sports venue food and beverage environment? Let’s just say that meeting that goal is much harder to reach. But part of Brzezinski’s role is to approach that standard.

“We were looking for someone who brings a fresh perspective and truly understands premium at the highest level,” Legends Global President/Hospitality Tom Funk said in an email. “Pawel’s background in fine dining and luxury hospitality, combined with his large venue and sports experience, makes him the perfect fit for us.”

With Jean-Georges Management, Brzezinski launched Chez Margaux, the company’s first private members’ club, opened 14 restaurants in 18 months, and through member engagement strategies, it drove double-digit revenue growth.

Brzezinski will report to Funk, while working closely with Chad Gregory, SVP of operational excellence, and all other company department heads.

Brzezinski and Funk knew each other from when the Polish native oversaw hospitality and retail at Barclays Center for Levy, his lone experience in sports. Brzezinski left the sports world during the pandemic. Returning six years later, he noticed the increased amount of attention toward premium offerings.

“The teams, the partners are thinking about how to build beautiful spaces,” said Brzezinski. “But my definition is not about the spaces; it’s about the entire experience. I think that’s the missing gap between the restaurant world and sports and entertainment.”

Based out of New York City, Brzezinski will shape Legends Global’s standards of service, including hiring and training, and how those standards are baked into the company’s premium settings across its 165 venue F&B clients.

His trained eyes see in live sports settings a general absence of emotional, intuitive service. Others in the industry are seeing that, too, like Aramark Sports + Entertainment, which partnered with Will Guidara for the A’s’ new Las Vegas stadium. Guidara promotes an over-the-top hospitality philosophy in the vein of Brzezinski’s teddy bear anecdote.

“The challenge isn’t building the premium spaces anymore, it’s making it matter,” Brzezinski said. “We are seeing a shift from premium as a space to premium as a strategy. The real opportunity is how you activate it across the entire journey and how you deliver it at scale.”

During my recent trip to Chicago, I shepherded a panel at the Kellogg Real Estate Conference and Venture Competition focused on sports-adjacent real estate.

The discussion, featuring Joe Myhra (COO, United Center), Eric Nordness (managing principal, Marquee Development), and Ari Glass (head of real estate, Mansueto/Chicago Fire FC), was the first in the conference’s 12-year history focused on a sports topic. Here are some interesting (and edited) comments from the three panelists:

Nordness, on the development and design approach to Wrigleyville: “From Day 1, it was all about being hyper-local. Wrigleyville was one of the original entertainment districts because it organically happened. The challenge for me as I came in was, one, I didn’t want to be in witness protection because we screwed up Wrigley Field and everything around it. Thinking very thoughtfully about placemaking; how do you look at the architecture? Don’t land a spaceship from outer space. Look at what the cadence is in your neighborhood, the architectural styles, the size and everything. We capped the size of our development purposely because we didn’t want to go too vertical. We wanted to fit in with the neighborhood.

“So, when we’re doing that for other teams, the big thing we talk about is connecting with the community. The franchise asset is always going to be more important than any real estate you do outside. My chairman, Tom [Ricketts], we said this [recently] in a meeting to another owner, you can give up 50, 100, 200 basis points on a deal. It doesn’t change the lives of these owners. What would change is if you do the wrong thing outside and you do something that doesn’t connect with the community, or you’re flipping it too quickly to another owner and now you’re at odds with your ecosystem.”

Myhra, regarding the 1901 Project’s investment in public green space: “Play allows for that curiosity, that exploration that we want to introduce into the development.”

Glass, regarding the Fire stadium’s riverfront site: “We wanted to find a spot that was going to be the easiest to get to from the most different modes of transportation. The river allows us to have river taxis and be able to shuttle people literally from heavy rail, so you can come into Union Station or Ogilvie and get on a water taxi and be dropped right off at the 78 and go to a match.”

Nordness: “That control of your environment, that ecosystem, marrying that with the capital is really the complexity of this [sports] environment now. How do we think about being really smart developers that are delivering the opportunistic rate of return for the markets right now or a low-20s project [internal rate of return] or something like that, in a seven-to-10-year horizon? If we were next to Ari or Joe, we’d think about how are we going to create control for you after we’re gone? Because we’re your partner now, but we may not always be there because our money isn’t always forever.”

Myhra: “The community center going into our music hall is dedicated to the community for their use. We’ve done a lot of stakeholder engagement interviews with our community to figure out what exactly they are looking to do. A good example is our alderman wants to host a bingo night, so I’m tasked with trying to figure out where we’re going to host a bingo night. Well, how many people are there? Two thousand people. [Laughs.] It’s incredible, right? I just want to be the one to call the numbers. That was my request.”

Glass, regarding the Fire and Related Companies’ relationship: “We’ll have streets shut down during our games. We’ll have traffic flows get significantly interrupted. There’s a lot riding on an ongoing relationship between us and Related to really enable them to have a successful development around us.”

Nordness, regarding what team owners struggle with most in this realm: “Most sports orgs that we work with, and we work with a ton of them now, they’re very thoughtful and deliberative. They have long strategic plans. They think about these assets as multi-generational. They’re thinking about media rights, disruption. They’re thinking about their digital ticketing, how do we go cashless in our venues, they do all those things and they’re very deliberate. Then they get into real estate. And it’s hard to get them lined up to say like once you make these decisions and once that train’s going, you can’t reanalyze, you can’t rethink it. Because we all know those are change orders, and those are things that their development can’t interrupt. The pace of development, once it gets going, is really hard for sports owners to get their arms around.”

Las Vegas is full of arenas. Its stock already includes T-Mobile Arena, Thomas & Mack Center, Orleans Arena, MGM Grand Garden Arena, Michelob Ultra Arena, and, if you want to include them, The Sphere and Allegiant Stadium.

And yet, proposals for new ones keep rolling in. In April alone, two new projects — the Las Vegas Diamond Arena and the Starr Vegas Development — were announced within a week.

Below are six Las Vegas arena proposals from the last decade (and month) that haven’t been built (yet, at least). Las Vegas has always attracted ambitious dreamers, which, besides the NBA’s inextinguishable interest in putting a franchise in the market, is probably the main factor driving this list.

Las Vegas Diamond Arena: This project is contingent on an NBA expansion team being awarded to Las Vegas; ergo, there is no project cost or timetable, though there is a venue capacity, the oddly specific 21,212 seats. Chetak Development Inc. is behind this effort and — if the NBA awards Vegas a team — the team ownership group seemingly would be involved, too.

Starr Vegas development: The sheer scale of this $10 billion proposal is impressive, including a 50,000-seat soccer stadium and a 25,000-seat basketball arena, both of which would be encompassed by an entertainment district. Starr Vegas claims to already have $6 billion committed toward the 63-acre project, led by longtime TV exec Chuck Haifley.

Bleutech Park: A $7.5 billion smart city project proposed (like several of these) for the less developed southern tip of Las Vegas’ Strip, would exist 100% off the power grid. LaBella Architects is the architect of record for this project. Bleutech Park claims it’ll be “NBA ready by Q2 2028.”

Oak View Group’s arena/resort: OVG tells me that this project is still alive and the company is considering its options. But the $10 billion arena-and-resort combo that former OVG CEO Tim Leiweke first unveiled in 2023 has stalled in the wake of his exit from the company.

LVXP: This multibillion-dollar, 27-acre project, which was announced about a year after OVG’s, certainly appears to have flatlined. Chief Construction Officer Nick Tomasino left LVXP in to join Bally’s, which is developing a mixed-use project next to the A’s’ new stadium.

All Net Arena: Former NBA and UNLV basketball player Jackie Lee Robinson’s $5 billion arena and resort proposal first announced in 2014 ultimately amounted to nothing and has led to him being sued by investors. The project, which would have featured a retractable roof, first broke ground in 2014 but was finally ended by Clark County Commissioners in 2023.

(SBJ research director David Broughton — who recently examined Louisville’s emergence as a sports business pacesetter — points to a new wave of downtown hotel development.)

Construction is booming in Louisville. Separate announcements in January that two prominent but empty downtown buildings were going to be converted into hotels was like winning a Daily Double at Churchill Downs.

The 26-story Fifth Third Bank building next to Fourth Street Live, an entertainment district run by Cordish Companies, will undergo a $185 million conversion into a 418-room JW Marriott slated to open in 2027. Additionally, the former Humana HQ, a 27-story, pink granite tower on West Main Street, is set for a $600 million to $700 million redevelopment beginning next year, creating a 1,000-room convention hotel.

The new properties will boost the downtown’s room inventory by 20% and will be just a few blocks from KFC Yum Center and the Kentucky International Convention Center KICC, two of the city’s most marketable sports venues.

Petco Park (a Delaware North Sportservice venue) and the Padres are serving Curry House CoCo Ichibanya’s Chicken Cutlet Curry Plate for $19.99. The dish is simple: chicken cutlet, known as katsu in Japan, served over rice with gravy and vegetables.

Curry House CoCo Ichibanya, known as “CoCoICHI,” was founded in 1978 in Nagoya, Japan, and now has more than 1,400 locations. Its website landing page says: “Good Smell. Good Curry.” Would I eat this? Uh, yes.

This Dwell story about developer-commissioned murals caught my eye, in part because I’m seeing these works of public art everywhere (especially where I live in a fast-developing part of Charlotte), and in part because they will likely be a fixture of many sports-adjacent mixed-use projects. The reactions to them can be quite mixed, but as one of the muralists quoted in the story said, “I think there’s a level of pride if your building has something rad on it.”

• Levy’s test kitchen is a hub of culinary innovation for the roughly 250 venues it serves, and in the magazine this week, I got an inside look at how it blends the data analysis with old-school foodie knowledge.
• HOK acquired Rossetti for an undisclosed sum, a deal that will raise eyebrows in the sports architecture world. The deal solidifies the family-owned Rossetti’s future, while increasing its opportunities through HOK’s bigger scale.
• I checked in on the progress for Northwestern’s New Ryan Field, with a video showing how the 35,000-seat stadium defies traditional college football stadium development.
• Basketball HOFer Nancy Lieberman joined Momentous Sports as an equity partner and strategic adviser, bringing a valuable perspective in women’s sports and celebrity culture to the firm’s inner circle.
• Over the next three years, Delaware North will spend $100 million on a three-year renovation of TD Garden that will include revamping all 83 of its suites for the home of the Celtics and Bruins.
• Another renovation moves ahead, as Barclays Center embarks on the third phase of its five-year, $150 million project, with a focus on a new atrium, box office and the American Express Card Member Entrance and Lounge.
• In the latest SBJ Football newsletter, SBJ’s Ben Fischer examines why Cowboys owner Jerry Jones signed a lease extension for AT&T Stadium more than 14 years early.
• A record 339 million people traveled to participate in or attend a sporting event in the United States in 2025, generated 191.8 million hotel room nights, and spent $111.2 billion while in the host destinations, writes SBJ’s David Broughton in a look at spending on tourism in the nation.