The Arizona Cardinals' 217-acre north Phoenix development is entering its next phase, with a newly hired CEO tasked with filling more than 150 remaining acres around the team's future headquarters with restaurants, offices, hotels and retail.
Rawhide Development Company, an affiliate of the Arizona Cardinals, named Ralph Ireland as CEO. Ireland will lead the development of the site at Loop 101 and Scottsdale Road, where the headquarters is already under construction.
The Cardinals headquarters and training facility will use about 30 acres of the site, totaling about 250,000 square feet of development. The project is expected to open in the summer of 2028. The project will cost about $200 million. It will be double the footprint of the team’s existing
training facility in Tempe.
Dignity Health is also developing a 300,000-square-foot medical campus at the site, totaling 8 acres near the team’s headquarters. The medical campus will be built in multiple phases, and will include a sports medicine institute, Barrow Neurological Institute services, orthopedics, cardiology, primary care and other services.
The center is designed to serve both professional athletes and the broader community. Construction on the first phase is expected to begin in 2027, with the opening expected in 2028.
Ireland said there has been “a lot of interest” on the site from other users. He would like to see a diversity of uses, including offices, health care, retail, restaurants and hospitality, as well as targeting large national companies along with local, smaller companies.
“Ultimately, if we do a great job, and I know we will, we will impact the whole area,” Ireland said. “It is incumbent on us to push the envelope here.”
The site was purchased by Minnesota-based developer Mortenson at an Arizona State Land Department auction in 2025. At the time, neither the Cardinals nor Mortenson revealed the partnership between the two or plans for the site. Later that year, the Cardinals announced plans for the headquarters and training facility. Rawhide Development Company, a Cardinals entity, is now the developer of the entire site, Ireland said.
Now, he said, his priority is determining what uses and developments will make up the balance of the site.
“We are focused on the curation of what this will be, creating a strategy of what will be the best fit,” he said.
A portion of the site had been eyed by another major user in 2024. A group led by former Arizona Coyotes owner Alex Meruelo had applied to buy about 100 acres of it to develop a mixed-use project that would have included a new arena for the team. At the time, the site was controlled by the Arizona State Land Department, which is required to sell its land at public auction.
After the auction had been scheduled, the department canceled it. Department officials said the development would require a special use permit, and said the Coyotes needed to secure it before buying the land.
At that point, the Coyotes had already moved to Utah, but the canceled auction ended Meruelo’s attempts to secure a new facility and reactivate the Coyotes franchise. The team has since been rebranded as the Utah Mammoth.
Corina Vanek covers development for The Arizona Republic. Reach her at cvanek@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on X @CorinaVanek.
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Arizona Cardinals seek restaurants, retail for massive Phoenix project
