Just a few months removed from its billion-dollar-plus acquisition by Legends, ASM Global continues to expand. Two recent moves highlight one of the ways worldwide venue manager ASM Global sees growth: the boom in amateur sport facilities and related travel.
ASM manages more than 300 venues worldwide, including the homes of the Arizona Cardinals, Brooklyn Nets and Houston Texans, but the business is increasingly expanding into amateur sports, too, in deals big and small. On Thursday the company acquired Edge Sports Group, which owns and operates a dozen amateur facilities, mostly ice rinks in Massachusetts that host elite junior hockey programs for boys and girls, drawing competitors nationally given the region’s critical mass of high-end competition.
“We see this as a major jumping off point to enter this industry even further … and really be a force to be reckoned with in the sports destination business,” said ASM Global CEO Ron Bension in a phone call.
The deal comes just after ASM announced a milestone at a much larger venue halfway around the world—opening up the $4 billion Kai Tak Sports Park in Hong Kong to testing ahead of its formal opening in 2025.
Occupying the land of a former airport in Hong Kong, Kai Tak is billed as the world’s largest sports development. It’s anchored by a 50,000-seat stadium with a retractable roof and a field surface that can host sports and concerts. Kai Tak also has a 10,000-capacity indoor sports arena designed to meet the requirements for international basketball and gymnastics and a 5,000-seat sports ground for the public–think school and local club matches. Plus it has areas for team and athlete training, running trails, cycling tracks, playgrounds and (less sporty) plenty of retail space. Part of the Chinese government’s intent with Kai Tak is to provide more outdoor athletic space for Hong Kong, which would be the third-most densely populated nation if it were an independent country. Kai Tak is expected to formally open with China’s Olympics-like National Games in early 2025.
“The scale of it [being built] all at once is just staggering. We have been on the ground at concept design, operational planning, catering and hospitality-scope program and the entire business plan for the district,” said Bension of the six-year-long development effort in Hong Kong. “Now we’re moving into extensive pre-operational planning, event procurement and this summer’s testing event to put a bow on it.”
There are plenty of obvious differences between helping design and build 70 acres of facilities and buying a regional operator of ice rinks. But the through-line is the increasing emphasis on amateur sports from large players. Earlier this year, billionaire sports team owners Josh Harris and David Blizter formed Unrivaled Sports, which aggregates the duo’s recent investment in youth and amateur facilities, including Cooperstown All Star Village and a complex at the football-themed development at the Canton Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Youth sports in recent years has been considered a sector ripe for consolidation, given its fragmented nature of primarily mom-and-pop owners of facilities and competitions. Youth sports is a $52 billion industry in the U.S. alone, generating more than 200 million trips annually, according to Sports Events & Tourism Association data cited by ASM.
The expansion deeper into amateur and youth sports doesn’t mean ASM is deemphasizing its large portfolio of pro sports—it manages seven NFL stadiums, multiple NBA and WNBA venues and a host of collegiate and minor league facilities. It does open the door for the business to potentially create a new revenue source by organizing and hosting its own competitions, according to Bension. On top of that, the ability to draw crowds to an area that sports attracts then allows ASM to leverage its experience in food and entertainment.
The plan, says the executive, is “as ASM and Edge move out, to use the sports destination as an engine, a traffic engine to power these other related and necessary components—hotels, restaurants, and shops—not unlike entertainment districts.”
