When the White Stadium project was first proposed in July 2023, it was described as a $30 million renovation. It was just announced that the overhaul will now cost more than $325 million, with $135 million coming from taxpayers.
At this scale, White Stadium is no longer a modest renovation. It is one of the most expensive athletic facility projects Boston has undertaken in recent years — and that reality forces a basic question the City has yet to answer clearly: what problem was this project meant to solve?
From the start, White Stadium was not conceived the way cities typically pursue major stadium investments. There was no serious exploration of alternative sites. There was no attempt to frame the project as an anchor institution capable of driving surrounding economic development, as other cities have done when committing public dollars at this scale. And there was no sustained public conversation about what kind of facility Boston actually needed.
Instead, the public was given a simpler explanation: the project would give Boston’s professional women’s soccer team a place to play and provide Boston Public Schools (BPS) students with a new venue for sports such as football.
That framing shaped — and narrowed — the debate.
Early concerns focused on scheduling. Would high school football games conflict with the professional soccer season? Would public access shrink over time, as has happened in other shared-use arrangements?
Those concerns were treated as logistical issues that could be managed with calendars and cooperation.
What received far less attention was a more fundamental question: did anyone evaluate whether the facility being proposed could realistically serve both purposes at all?
In modern athletic facility design, this question is not philosophical — it is technical.
You cannot maintain a professional-quality natural grass field and simultaneously allow it to be used regularly by local high school teams. It simply does not work. Grass cannot withstand constant use — daily practices, repeated games, football cleats, multi-sport turnover — and still meet professional standards. That is precisely why Boston, Harvard, and most urban athletic programs long ago moved to artificial turf for high-use municipal and school facilities. Durable access requires durable surfaces.
Professional grass fields are protected assets. They must be rationed, rested, and repaired. When they are not, the quality deteriorates quickly.
When conflicts did emerge, the soccer team’s owners addressed their operational needs by building a separate, dedicated practice facility in Brockton. From a professional standpoint, this was entirely logical. A grass match field must be protected; daily training cannot occur on the same surface without degrading it.
In professional stadium design, field availability is governed less by calendars than by agronomy, recovery cycles, and surface integrity.
We initially assumed the conflict would be over who could use the field and when. What has become clear, however, is that the real conflict is not competition for field time, but the amount of time the field must remain unused by anyone in order to be preserved to professional standards.
That decision clarified an important point: White Stadium is being designed and managed as a match-first venue, not a daily-use athletic field.
Once practices were removed from the site, responsibility shifted to the City, BPS, and planning agencies to determine whether the remaining shared-use vision actually worked. That analysis was never clearly presented to the public.
There are two very different problems the City could have been trying to solve.
If the goal was to bring a professional women’s soccer team to Boston, then the facility design largely works. A protected grass field, limited access, and professional control over scheduling are consistent with modern soccer venues.
Where the project breaks down is not design, but politics and public justification.
If White Stadium is, in practice, a professional venue first and a school facility second, then the unavoidable question becomes: why is the City spending so much taxpayer money to make this happen? City officials have repeatedly denied that public funds are subsidizing a stadium for wealthy team owners, yet the scale of public investment, construction risk, and long-term land commitment makes that distinction difficult to sustain.
This is not an argument against women’s sports. It is an argument for clarity.
If, instead, the primary goal was to expand athletic opportunity for Boston Public Schools students, the proposal fails a basic test. A professional-grade grass field cannot realistically support daily football practices, frequent games, and year-round multi-sport use. It must be protected and rationed, leaving limited access for the very students it was publicly justified to serve.
The inclusion of a running track only underscores the mismatch.
No modern professional soccer stadium — or NFL stadium in the United States or England — includes a running track around the field. Stadiums have been removing tracks for the past 30 years for good reasons: tracks reduce sightlines, diminish atmosphere, limit flexibility, and create facilities that are optimized for neither sport.
Boston already has substantial track infrastructure. What Boston lacks are durable, high-use athletic fields.
Under the current plan, White Stadium would deliver one professional-quality grass field and one track. In practice, BPS will get little meaningful use from the most expensive component— the field — while the remaining benefit is effectively a running track that could be built elsewhere for $1–$2 million. At $325 million, that is an extraordinary price for an asset that cannot function as a workhorse for public schools.
Boston already knows what works. Facilities such as Brighton’s Daly Field succeed because they maximize daily use through multiple fields and clearly separated functions. Modern stadium design moved away from track-and-field hybrids decades ago for a reason: combining professional soccer, grass surfaces, and tracks produces facilities that are expensive, constrained, and underutilized.
The risk Boston now faces is not choosing one path over another— but pretending both paths lead to the same place. That is not a soccer debate. It is a planning failure — and one the City can still correct.
Ed Gaskin is Executive Director of Greater Grove Hall Main Streets and founder of Sunday Celebrations
