SBJ Unpacks: Sacramento Republic’s growing ambitions

Tonight in Unpacks: The Sacramento Republic’s stadium scope has expanded from a $120 million project to one costing $450 million, adding more seats as the Native American tribe funding the venue seeks a shift from sponsorship to ownership in sports.

Also tonight:

• Pistons’ Tom Gores: ‘There are no limits’ to turnaround
• GSE, Full Day to host college volleyball event at AT&T Stadium
• Brands finding prime real estate with Amazon
• Op-ed: Fixing college sports starts with knowing what athletes earn

Listen to SBJ’s most popular podcast, Morning Buzzcast, where Joe Lemire discusses FIFA’s lack of World Cup media rights agreements for China and India, the state of soccer and tennis in Saudi Arabia, remembering Yankees broadcast legend John Sterling and more.

Sacramento Republic FC unveiled a $175 million, 12,000-seat Railyards stadium project in August 2025, and even held a groundbreaking.

New renderings nine months later showed a project that had expanded significantly. The canopied 20,000-seater, costing $450 million (according to a source close to the situation), made clear the ambition of Wilton Rancheria, the local Native American tribe that majority-owns Sacramento Republic and is financing the USL club’s stadium.

The tribe and the club decided to nearly triple the project budget and add 8,000 seats — work that was planned for future phases — because of strong ticket demand and a desire to accelerate the construction.

“The ownership continued to weigh the option of that phased approach,” said Dustin Vicari, Republic’s chief revenue officer, “and really the future is now.”

The design changes were the latest twist in one of the industry’s longest-running stadium pursuits. Past surprises sputtered Sacramento Republic’s progress, but these changes seem to indicate a club intent on taking control of its destiny as much as possible.

“It’s always been the case of Sacramento Republic that we’ve needed a new home to take our club to the next level,” President Tim Holt said in early April on his 35th day in the role. “It’s been a club need for some time. I don’t think that’s secret.”

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The new plans, designed by Manica, are made possible by Wilton Rancheria, believed to be the first Native American majority owner of a men’s pro sports team in the U.S. (the Sycuan Tribe has an equal ownership stake in MLS’s San Diego FC with Sir Mohamed Mansour). Wilton’s 4-year-old Sky River Casino, located in Elk Grove, Calif., southeast of Sacramento, appears to be very financially productive, though details are hard to find.

Wilton Rancheria is part of a slowly burgeoning class of tribal sports investors, like the Sycuan, that are looking at sports industry possibilities differently.

“We, as tribes, collectively spend close to $100 million in sports sponsorships,” said Wilton Rancheria Chief Operating Officer Chris Franklin. “I wanted to see this paradigm shift from sponsorship — how do we get into the equity game?”

The Future, Now

The newer version of Sacramento Republic’s Railyards stadium indicates a completely different level of ambition compared to the $3 million Heart Health Park, the club’s 11,500-seat home since 2014.

The April renderings showed the canopy and second level absent from the earlier version, and the greater capacity is expandable to roughly 27,000 for concerts. The 2028 opening date is a year later, too, and the contractor (formerly Turner Construction) is now Moorefield Construction, two changes made because of the larger project scope.

Building planned phases now should help the club mitigate potential construction and labor cost inflation and materials pricing and availability disruptions, and to reach the end goal faster.

The bigger plans also reflect opportunity: Sacramento is the only top-30 DMA that doesn’t have a concert venue as big as the new stadium will be.

And the club’s executives still speak openly about their goal to join MLS more than a decade after first trying. Sacramento Republic was awarded an MLS franchise in 2019, only for that to evaporate two years later when billionaire Ron Burkle pulled his funding.

For the duration of its flirtation with MLS, Republic has lacked the soccer-specific stadium that would have sealed the deal. But when The Athletic reported in late April that MLS’s board of governors had met about a potential relocation of the Vancouver Whitecaps, Sacramento was again mentioned among the potential destinations.

“The one thing that’s consistent is that the ambitions of the club are unchanged, which is to play and compete at the highest level of professional soccer in our country,” said Holt. “And so that quest continues. This building opening should make everything possible, because that’s been the big missing piece.”

Growing Demand

After announcing the initial 12,000-seat stadium last August, Sacramento Republic received 10,000 season-ticket deposits. That demand sparked further study into the possibility of doing the entire project at once. The timing of deciding to go bigger with the project “depends on who you ask,” said Franklin. “If you’re asking me, it’s always been my intention to go bigger out of the gate.”

The expanded stadium size will enable the club to host the kinds of events that have routinely bypassed Sacramento: Gold Cup; World Cup qualifiers; U.S. men’s and women’s national team friendlies; international club soccer friendlies; college championship games; rugby; and outdoor concerts.

The Kings’ Golden 1 Center brought in gross ticket sales of $53.5 million in 2025, according to Pollstar, 43rd most among global arenas. But Sacramento lacks a large outdoor concert venue. Republic’s stadium will employ a grass playing surface, as well as retractable seating in the north end, to enable more fans on the field level for shows.

The higher project budget reflects, in part, additional steel needed to support the canopy/roof covering the stadium. The new renderings also show video boards in two corners that weren’t previously present.

Additional investment (and capacity) went into the west-side structure, which will house much of the venue’s premium seating. Republic FC didn’t skimp on premium; nearly all MLS venues have less than 20% premium seating (of total capacity), but the Sacramento stadium will top 20%.

“We’ve decided to lean more heavily into premium and future-proof this building for the premium surge that buildings across the country are seeing,” Vicari said.

Manica’s premium design includes pitch-level suites, a tunnel club that players will pass through between the field and locker rooms, loge boxes along the stadium’s sidelines and social spaces and terraces in all four corners.

“I was blown away by the level of detail and quality and thoughtfulness in this venue. This is not your typical lower-division soccer stadium that’s just been upsized to 20,000 seats,” said Holt, the former president of USL. “It will rival the best ones in the country. We’ve had the benefit of a generation of learning from these types of stadiums now.”

Tribal Backing

While Sacramento Republic’s previous ownership group spent the 2010s trying to wrangle MLS membership, Wilton Rancheria was simultaneously wading through California approvals processes to get a casino built.

The casino represented redemption for Wilton Rancheria’s 1,600 members. Their ancestors living in the Sacramento region were brutalized during 19th-century colonization by Spain, Mexico and the U.S. The state later terminated their federal tribal recognition in 1959. It was another 60 years before that recognition was restored in 2009.

The first steps toward a casino and financial self-sufficiency were taken shortly after. Wilton Rancheria’s reported $500 million Sky River Casino project with publicly traded Boyd Gaming was approved in 2018 and opened in August 2022. It holds 2,500 slot machines and more than 80 table games, and has already expanded once. Another phase, including a 300-room hotel and an entertainment and convention center, broke ground in late April and is planned for completion in 2028, when Sky River will become the second-largest tribal gaming operation in California.

Sky River is the closest casino to Sacramento, and no more than a two-hour drive from most parts of the Bay Area. Its financial performance is well guarded, but one line in Boyd Gaming’s 2025 annual report noted “the sustained operating strength of the recently opened property,” in reference to Sky River. To give some indication of the dollars involved, consider that Wilton Rancheria paid Boyd Gaming a $98.9 million management fee to operate the casino in 2025.

Tribal gaming is a $44 billion industry, involving more than 500 properties and operations and more than 250 tribal governments (in 29 U.S. states), according to the National Indian Gaming Commission.

California legalized tribal gaming in the early 2000s, and Wilton Rancheria has followed a similar path as the Sycuan, deploying casino revenue through investments in land and other assets; sponsoring local sports (in Wilton Rancheria’s case, Sacramento State athletics and a local Association of Pickleball Players tour stop); and pouring money into tribal healthcare and education systems, and the Elk Grove and Sacramento communities.

Sky River has “become this economic engine for us,” Franklin said. “My goal is, how do we diversify outside of gaming? And for us, this [stadium] investment is a huge piece.”

The investment includes the surrounding 17-acre development owned by the tribe and overseen by master developer Pegasus Development. Development plans haven’t been publicized yet, but they will provide Wilton with another owned revenue generator and an example to the sports industry of the impact tribes can have.

Tribes can address at least two long-running issues for sports leagues, Franklin said: “We’re long-term capital and we’re not looking to relocate.”

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Nearly 15 years after purchasing a majority stake in the Pistons, Tom Gores won his first playoff series as team owner this postseason. With the Pistons experiencing a rebirth of the team’s brand in Detroit and coming off a Game 7 victory with the second highest attendance in Little Caesars Arena history with over 20,000 fans, the question now is how far this version of the franchise can go.

Gores sat down with SBJ to chat about the franchise’s comeback, the evolution of the Pistons’ brand and what he believes this run -- led by GM Trajan Langdon, coach J.B. Bickerstaff, President of Business Operations Melanie Harris and All-Star G Cade Cunningham -- says about the future. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Q: What did you tell the team going into this season, coming off last year’s playoff berth?

Gores: The message was that there are no limits. I’m a kid from Flint, and I’ve seen how people try to put limits on you. I told them we weren’t going to do that here. No excuses, no ceilings and no complacency just because we’d made the playoffs. Both summers we had team dinners at my house and talked very directly about what success looks like and how we’re going to get there. I shared some of my business experiences because the players are curious about that, and it gives them a different lens on what it takes. From there, it’s been about culture. J.B. has done a tremendous job making this a cohesive, unselfish group -- starting with Cade. I can give all the speeches I want, but he has to coach it and the players have to feel it.

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Q: You’ve said you really get to know people in times of pain. What did you learn about this group, players, coaches and maybe even the front office, during the stretch when you were down 3-1?

Gores: You learn a lot about people when their back is against the wall and our group never blinked. They never quit. They never panicked. They never lost faith. They kept believing in themselves and each other. That’s the kind of character this organization has and it’s a reflection of the culture we’ve built, from top to bottom across basketball and business. I’m so proud of the way they kept fighting, refusing to let this great season end. The comeback was hard, but I also think the experience made us better. It showed what we’re capable of and now our group really knows what it takes. I’m excited about the next series. We have to come out with that same sense of urgency every night.

Q: What feels different inside the organization now compared with two years ago?

Gores: The biggest difference is alignment. Two years ago, different parts of the organization weren’t always pulling in the same direction. Now the front office, the floor and the business side are really connected, and that creates real momentum. I’m naturally someone who worries about what can go wrong, but what excites me about this group is the sustainability. This doesn’t feel like a couple of lucky years. We’ve built a core that’s here to last.

Q: Where do you see the Pistons’ brand relative to the rest of the league now?

Gores: We’re in great shape. To me, brand is about walking the talk, and right now we’re actually living the things we say we care about -- excellence, grit, all of it. We’re a storied franchise, which is a big advantage, but we’ve also made a lot of progress in how we present ourselves and connect with people. With the momentum we have, I couldn’t be happier with where the Pistons brand sits and the position we’re in to keep building on it.

Q: How do you reflect on when you weren’t winning and things didn’t look as promising as they do now?

Gores: You’ve got to go through some pain to get somewhere. Looking back, I’m proud and grateful for where we are, but those years remind me that you win by doing the basic work over and over. In this turnaround, that meant being demanding in the searches -- interviewing everybody, asking every candidate for a work product, really pushing to see if they were made for it. With Trajan, for example, I met with him six or seven times for hours. When I finally decided, I called him late at night and said, “We’re going to go through some hard times. Do you have the stomach for it?” He said yes. I told him to text me his top 20 action items in the morning, and he did. From there, he’s done a great job recruiting the right people and getting our front office in tremendous shape. When I reflect on those years, it’s all those little things, the boring, basic work, that made the difference.

Q: You’ve been the owner since 2011. Over those nearly 15 years, what has worked and what hasn’t on the business side?

Gores: On the business side, the biggest change has been the caliber of people we’ve brought in to run it. We’ve always tried to get excellence to Detroit with coaches, executives, everybody and I’d give us an A for effort, even if we didn’t always get it right. Where we fell short was communicating how committed we were to the community. We were all‑in on Detroit, but when the on‑court product was bad, that didn’t always come across, and people wondered if I might move or sell the team. The lesson for me is you never stop trying. If something doesn’t work, you adjust and keep going, because at the end of the day fans care about both: what you do in the community, and whether you win.

Q: What’s next for you and for the Pistons, broadly?

Gores: On the floor, we’ve got a group that’s having success and believes in itself. Organizationally, I feel like we’re built to last. The leadership is in place with Trajan, J.B. and Melanie, and I don’t know if you’ll find many franchises in a better position than we are right now. For us, it goes back to the same idea: no limits. That’s how I see the future for this group.

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Full Day Productions and GSE Worldwide aim to break the record for the highest attendance at a volleyball game through a collaboration to host Spikes Under the Lights, a one-night showcase at AT&T Stadium. Set for Aug. 27, the event will feature Nebraska, Penn State, Florida and SMU competing in two semifinals matches followed by a championship match. The event is set to be hosted on a major national network to be announced in the coming weeks with a simulcast on cable.

GSE Worldwide and Full Day Productions, 50/50 partners in the property, are backing the concept with a $1M purse -- $800,000 of which will be set aside as appearance fees divided evenly among the four programs with $200,000 reserved as prize money, weighted toward the winner. Schools will determine how to distribute those dollars between athletes and teams budgets.

GSE Worldwide will oversee the live side of the event, managing in-venue production, stadium operations, marketing and ticket sales. Full Day Productions will lead the television operation, handling the broadcast production and integrating sponsor elements on air. Both companies will participate in sponsorship sales, with GSE Worldwide primarily activating partners on site at AT&T Stadium and Full Day focusing on the broadcast and studio components. While GSE Worldwide and Full Day are still finalizing the sponsorship lineup, endemic brands have already shown interest, said GSE Worldwide EVP and GSE Productions President Jon Venison.

The two chose AT&T Stadium thanks to its scale and flexibility. The venue’s retractable roof removes weather risk for a one-night event and a configuration that can stretch to roughly 100,000 fans gives it a realistic shot at surpassing the current volleyball attendance record of just over 92,000.

“We think it’s an amazing opportunity to take our first foray into women’s college sports. We see it as a huge growth area,” Venison said. “We needed a place where it had capacity that could exceed it [volleyball attendance record], and with the roof over the top, it helps,” Venison said.

GSE’s expansion into live events has accelerated since BC Partners Credit’s investment, with acquisitions like InsideOut and Net Results Marketing giving the agency the balance sheet and infrastructure to own and operate properties like Pickleball Slam, Major League Pickleball, the World Series of Beach Volleyball and more.

“This continues our strategy of building our own IP and creating more owned and operated properties for GSE,” GSE Worldwide CEO and 2009 SBJ Forty Under 40 honoree Mike Principe said. “We look for good ideas and concepts that we think will resonate with the market, then we have a very disciplined marketing plan that’s integrated across sponsorship sales, television and PR. Then, it all comes down to flawless execution.”

Ticketing will run through SeatGeek, with a staggered rollout. Pre-sales for AT&T Stadium suite holders are slated to begin May 4, followed by a SeatGeek pre-sale on May 7 and tickets becoming available to the public starting May 8 via SpikesUnderTheLights.com. The two are planning for the event to become a staple on the women’s volleyball calendar rather than a one-off with a cast of rotating schools annually.

“We believe that growth begins when you move from renting a seat at the table to building your own,” said Nickole Tara, CBO of Words + Pictures and Full Day Productions.

Amazon Prime Video is closing in on its first full year of sports programming, and the 365-day strategy is paying off for brands. Prime now has the NFL, NBA, NASCAR and NWSL, while its deal with the WNBA launches next week (complete with Nielsen measurement for WNBA games for the first time).

“All of this is creating year-round opportunities for brands, and it’s proving incredibly successful,” said Tanner Elton, Prime Video’s VP/U.S. advertising sales, ahead of Upfronts week.

One example of that success, Elton said, was through State Farm, which was advertising on both “TNF” and the NBA with Prime in Q4, and the insurance firm is finding advertising on both is paying off. State Farm saw a 72% conversion rate for customers who watched both the NFL and NBA compared to viewers who watched just one of the sports on Prime, he said.

Since bringing the “TNF” package exclusively to Prime in 2022, Prime has introduced 79 brands that weren’t previous advertisers to the league. In its first season on Prime, the NBA was exposed to 31 brands.

“We feel like it’s still Day 1 at Amazon and there’s so much more that we’re going to be able to do,” Elton said.

A key driver for Prime Video has been its age demographics, Elton said. The median age for “TNF” viewers on Prime is seven years younger than NFL fans on linear. The NBA? Nine years younger. Even NASCAR watchers on Prime are on average five years younger than on linear.

“When you think about that shift in wanting to continue to be relevant, all of that, inclusive of engagement, is why Prime Video is no longer an alternative to linear,” Elton said. “But we’re just competing now at the broadcast level, which is a really exciting place for us to be at.”

Major sports themes to expect at Amazon’s Upfront next Monday include the property’s deal with Duke to air three of its games, as well as “Madden,” the Prime biopic on the late Hall of Fame coach that releases this November just before the platform’s Black Friday NFL game.

“These sports biopics, these massive sports entertainment stories, how we’re going to be able to launch and integrate brands around them with actual sports happening in that moment,” Elton said. “Those synergies are going to be pretty special from a sponsorship and a creative opportunity.”

College sports is not broken because athletes started getting paid. It’s broken because we started paying them without anyone knowing how much.

Over the past three years, college athletics has transformed faster than at any point in its history. The old model based on scholarships as the only acceptable form of payment is gone. Courts rejected it, and the payment floodgates promptly opened.

Today’s athletes can earn money in multiple ways: direct revenue sharing from schools, NIL deals with businesses, booster-funded collectives and, in some cases, private arrangements that live entirely outside public view. None of this is theoretical anymore. A highly recruited quarterback choosing between two universities is no longer just asking about offensive schemes or facilities. He is asking about compensation packages. That is not the real problem.

Professional athletes get paid. Olympic athletes get paid. Coaches certainly get paid. The public has largely moved on from the argument that college players should be restricted to tuition and a meal plan while everyone else profits. The sport has not become chaotic because compensation exists. It has become chaotic because compensation is unmeasured.

Right now, college sports operates as the only major competitive league in the world where there is no reliable way to know team payrolls. The NFL, NBA and MLB function not because players are unpaid, but because the leagues know exactly what teams spend. Salary caps, luxury taxes and competitive-balance systems all depend on a simple prerequisite: measurement.

Yes, universities have agreed to pay approximately $20 million per year to athletes, but that doesn’t tell nearly the full picture. Schools may report what they pay directly. That is only one stream of income. NIL collectives funded by boosters operate independently. Local businesses sign athletes to marketing deals. Some alumni provide support entirely outside organized channels. Each piece may be legal, but together they create a system in which competitive balance is determined less by coaching, recruiting or player development and more by the size and organization of a school’s donor base.

As a result, coaches complain about “tampering.” Fans wonder why rosters turn over every year. Administrators cannot enforce rules that depend on spending limits because they do not know what the spending actually is.

Before college sports can regulate compensation, it needs a way to measure it.

Fortunately, a solution already exists in principle. Every athlete, like every American, must report income to the IRS. Rather than trying to track every endorsement deal and booster arrangement individually, which is an impossible task, the sport could adopt a confidential verification system. Athletes would submit tax documentation to an independent auditing clearinghouse, not to the NCAA and not to the public. The clearinghouse would verify total compensation and report only aggregate team payroll figures.

No individual earnings would be disclosed. Privacy would remain intact. But for the first time, the sport would know what each roster actually costs.

With measurement comes a capability to govern. Conferences or the NCAA could establish a soft cap, a competitive-balance tax or spending aprons. Schools that break the rules and exceed agreed-upon limits would face forward-looking penalties such as postseason ineligibility or financial redistribution. Excess spending could even be taxed and directed toward academic or non-revenue sports programs, aligning competitive fairness with equitable opportunity and educational purpose.

None of these suggestions are crazy. Every major sports league uses some version of them. What is crazy is trying to regulate a market where the basic economics are unknown.

The debate over college sports often sounds like a moral argument: amateurism versus professionalism, tradition versus change. But the real issue is that we accidentally created professional sports without a salary system that allows anyone to see the full picture. Paying players did not ruin college sports, but a lack of transparency into a dramatically inequitable playing field might.

Before Congress, courts or universities attempt sweeping reforms, they should begin with a simpler step. Measure what athletes are actually earning by having them submit their tax returns to an independent private database. Only then can anyone — administrators, legislators, players or fans — decide what rules are fair and what competition is supposed to look like.

Simply put, without an accurate scoreboard, it will be difficult to ensure the future integrity of the game.

Russell Sherman is a Partner at Prosek Partners, a strategic communications and marketing firm.

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