It’s official: Browns are moving to Brook Park

Team officials announce they will focus their stadium efforts on a dome in Brook Park.

The Cleveland Browns made the inevitable official on Thursday.

The club is pulling up stakes and leaving downtown Cleveland to play in a domed stadium in the Cleveland suburb of Brook Park.

The announcement ends months of speculation over whether the Browns would work out a deal with the Cleveland officials to renovate Huntington Bank Field, the team’s home since 1999, or depart for 176 acres near Cleveland Hopkins Airport that can accommodate not only a domed stadium, but also a “lifestyle and entertainment district with retail, residential space, and hotels.

There has been speculation in recent days that the Browns were planning to announce their intentions but were waiting for the right time to do so. That time arrived earlier in the day when Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb let the cat out of the bag by releasing a statement saying the team was leaving in a decision he called “frustrating and profoundly disheartening”:

Last night, I had a meeting with Jimmy and Dee Haslam, principals of the Haslam Sports Group (HSG), in which they expressed their intent to relocate the Cleveland Browns to Brook Park. Their decision comes 48 hours after the Cavs and Cleveland Clinic broke ground on a project which brings the Cavs practice facility back into Cleveland, 24 hours after the U.S. Department of Transportation awarded $60 million dollars to advance our lakefront plans, and just before a historic weekend of rock and roll and playoff baseball in downtown Cleveland.

We can see and feel that our downtown is thriving, our vision for redeveloping the lakefront is becoming reality, and more and more businesses are choosing to invest in our city. The Haslams’ choice to move the team away from this progress is frustrating and profoundly disheartening.

As mayor, I will always prioritize the needs of our residents and businesses. The Haslam Sports Group may want a roof over their heads, but my responsibility is to ensure that Cleveland residents have a roof over theirs.

As such, I am deeply disappointed that, despite our exhaustive efforts, the Haslam Sports Group is choosing to pursue a move to Brook Park. This is a deliberate choice—one driven by a desire to maximize profits rather than positive impact. They had the opportunity to reinvest in Cleveland, transform the current stadium into a world-class facility, enhance the fan experience, and remain highly profitable. We put those options on the table in good faith. Unfortunately, that was not enough.

Bibb went on to say that the decision will “damage the city, county and region in a multitude of ways,” including harming downtown businesses, undermining public investments, negatively impacting recovery efforts in downtown, and exposing state taxpayers without a clear return on investment.

The Browns followed up with a statement from owners Dee and Jimmy Haslam reiterating that while their initial desire was to find a way to renovate the current stadium, they ultimately decided that a domed stadium was needed to “justify the magnitude of this public-private partnership”:

We have communicated to the Mayor and his team at every step of the process regarding our mutual efforts to keep the stadium downtown and we conveyed to them yesterday, our most impactful investment for our region is to focus on making a dome stadium and adjacent development in Brook Park a reality. With the funding mechanisms we continue to work on, this stadium will not use existing taxpayer-funded streams that would divert resources from other more pressing needs. Instead, the over $2 billion private investment, together with the public investment, will create a major economic development project that will drive the activity necessary to pay the public bond debt service through future project-generated and Browns-generated revenue.

A solution like this will be transformative not only for Cleveland and Northeast Ohio, but also the entire state of Ohio from the resulting events, tourism, and job creation. Additionally, moving the current stadium will allow the city and region’s collective vision for the Cleveland lakefront to be optimally realized, and downtown will benefit from the major events the Brook Park dome brings to the region.

Cleveland and Northeast Ohio are the fabric of the Browns and that will always be the case. Our community commitment to Cleveland and efforts to improve the lives of its residents will not change. We are confident that the Brook Park project will significantly benefit the Northeast Ohio region for generations to come.

While the Browns current lease with the city does not expire until the end of 2028, today’s announcement effectively brings to a close what has been the team’s home since its inaugural season in 1946, first at Cleveland Municipal Stadium until 1995, and at the current location since 1999.

The cost for the domed stadium has been estimated at $2.4 million, although with cost overruns and the rising cost of construction materials and labor, it will certainly end up being higher.

In today’s statement, team officials said they will not look to use “existing taxpayer-funded streams” as a funding source, but rather that the “major economic development project will drive the activity necessary to pay the public bond debt service through future project-generated and Browns-generated revenue.”

It is unclear how that all shakes out currently, but it is safe to assume that taxpayers will be responsible for some of the cost.