Long Beach is studying the possibility of landing a professional sports team, putting up to $80,000 behind a study of whether a mostly empty downtown parking lot could become the site of a brand-new stadium. City leaders have not picked a team, a league or even a sport, but they have picked a location to study: the 13-acre Elephant Lot next to the Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center.
The city plans to hire a firm to examine which professional franchises might be interested in relocating or expanding to Long Beach and what kind of facility would need to be built to house them, according to the Long Beach Post. The city has approved a study budget of up to $80,000, and whichever vendor is selected will receive a one-year contract that Long Beach may renew for a second year. Mayor Rex Richardson has been blunt about where things stand: no team or sport has been selected, and the study is meant to prepare the city to make smart business decisions rather than lock in a specific pursuit.
Why the Elephant Lot, and Why Now
The Elephant Lot is largely vacant today, but it carries a colorful past — the site was once used for the Ringling Bros. circus — and it is used to create turns for the Long Beach Grand Prix and serves as a staging area for film crews, per the Long Beach Post's reporting on how a developed lot and the race could coexist. The parcel is also considered one of the few remaining waterfront development opportunities left in the region, a scarcity that makes it attractive even before a tenant is identified.
USC sports journalism professor Jeff Fellenzer said the timing is right for this kind of study, and he recommended that Long Beach look beyond the four biggest American sports leagues as it weighs options. That advice lines up with where much of the momentum in professional sports has shifted lately: up-and-coming leagues are gaining dedicated social-media followings, and, as Smart Cities Dive has reported, professional sports opportunities are emerging in women's sports and minor-league baseball specifically.
Women's Sports and Volleyball on the Radar
Richardson has pointed to women's sports as a major opportunity for the city, and he specifically mentioned League One Volleyball as a league worth considering. The Athletic identifies LOVB Los Angeles as the league's seventh franchise, and LA Orbit is set to play its 2027 home games at Intuit Dome in Inglewood — the $2 billion arena the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers call home, according to The Athletic. The league already has local roots: it hosted its finals at the Pyramid at Cal State Long Beach in March. The Athletic also notes that volleyball brings a massive participation base along with an enormous young and female audience, a dynamic reinforced by the WNBA, which drew a league-record 3.79 million fans in 2026, a 20% year-over-year jump, per the Sports Business Journal.
Minor-league baseball has also come up as a possible fit.
The Olympic Backdrop
Richardson has said Long Beach should use the momentum of the 2028 Olympics to attract long-term investors, framing the Games as a moment the city cannot afford to waste. The Long Beach Post reports the city is expected to host 11 Olympic events and seven Paralympic events in 2028, for a total of 18 combined Los Angeles Olympic and Paralympic Games events, as Smart Cities Dive has separately reported.
This is not Long Beach's first swing at landing a major-league tenant. The city tried in 2018 to lure the Angels away from Anaheim for a new stadium, a pursuit that the Los Angeles Times reported could have cost more than $1.1 billion for a waterfront ballpark alone. At the time, the city estimated the stadium itself at $900 million, not including more than $200 million in financing costs and an additional $105 million for a 3,500-space parking garage — numbers that never materialized into a deal.
Transportation and Site Questions Loom Large
Getting fans downtown remains a central concern. Downtown Long Beach has only one major freeway leading directly into it, and a waterfront location limits the reach of a team's marketing pool, since a franchise built there would need to reach twice as far inland to recruit fans compared with a more centrally located site. John Costello, who spent nearly two decades as marketing director for Cal State Long Beach athletics, said downtown Long Beach faces real hurdles before any team would consider making the Elephant Lot a permanent home.
Richardson has said the city needs to explore every transportation avenue for the next 50 years, and Long Beach is already taking steps to allow alternative transportation methods downtown, which could include expanded water-taxi service to and from neighboring cities. Despite the water views that could make a stadium picturesque, the site had unresolved physical questions in 2021: the Elephant Lot had not received a formal appraisal, and studies of its seismic resilience — the land is built on infill — and the effect of the water table below were incomplete, according to the Long Beach Business Journal.
Legal and Fiscal Caveats
The Elephant Lot is within the state Tidelands area and subject to the public trust doctrine, a legal framework relevant to any future venue plans.
The broader economics of stadium-building also suggest caution. Most studies find that building professional stadiums does not promote local employment or per-capita income growth, according to Econofact, which notes that state and local governments poured roughly $33 billion into major-league sports venues across the U.S. and Canada between 1970 and 2020. Oakland, meanwhile, countered the Athletics' pursuit of relocation to Nevada with a proposed 35,000-seat waterfront ballpark carrying a $475 million public financing component, Econofact reported — a reminder that even well-funded stadium plans can still fall apart.
For now, Long Beach's plan stays at the study phase, with a vendor still to be chosen and no team or sport selected.
