The Portland Hearts of Pine are looking to move, with plans calling for swapping a view of the highway for a view of the waterway.
The Maine men’s professional soccer club on Tuesday will reveal plans to build a new home stadium in Portland’s West End, with a goal of starting construction in late 2027 and moving from its current home at Fitzpatrick Stadium in 2029. The stadium will also be the home of the Hearts of Pine’s women’s team, which will start play in May 2027.
The new stadium will be located at Cassidy Point at the site of the Sprague Energy terminal, and will seat between 9,000 and 11,000 people and cost around $50 million to build, according to Hearts of Pine senior manager of communications Lisa Frates. Frates said the stadium will be “predominantly” privately funded.
Hearts founder Gabe Hoffman-Johnson said a new stadium was part of the plan when he began the process to bring a professional soccer team to Portland in 2018.
A rendering of the proposed new Hearts of Pine stadium at Cassidy Point in Portland. (Courtesy of SMRT Architects & Engineers)
How quicky the team reached the point that building a stadium is feasible, he acknowledged, is a surprise.
“There was a part of this vision, of this dream, that was a 9-10,000-seat stadium, full,” he said. “That was the vision. I think it’s certainly beyond my wildest dreams to be making this announcement just over a year and a half through the club’s existence on the pitch. … The support that we’ve gotten, that part has blown me away. It’s been incredibly magical.”
Since debuting on the field in March 2025, the Hearts have become a sensation in both the state and its largest city, with sellout crowds flocking to every home game. Hoffman-Johnson said the waitlist for season tickets was 7,700 people long the last time he checked.
With so much interest, the opportunity for a new stadium — which will seat 3,000 to 5,000 more people than Fitzpatrick — had arrived.
“The demand that we’ve seen over these past couple of years is so crazy that we feel like we owe it to the community to be able to let more people watch it,” Hearts president Kevin Schohl said. “(There were) all these stories we’d hear about people who want to come to our games, they want to let their kids come to a game, they can’t get tickets, if you try to find tickets on the secondary market they’re so expensive.
“We can’t do a whole lot about that when there’s so much more demand than the stadium can hold.”
Portland Hearts of Pine fans cheer during the final regular-season game of the team’s inaugural season on Oct. 25. The team effectively sold out for the 2026 season, with limited standing room only and Last Chance Tickets available at a later date. (Libby Kamrowski Kenny/Staff Photographer)
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The Hearts had specifications in mind for their new home. One was the capacity: large enough to accommodate the fanbase, but not so large that empty seats might dampen what has become a raucous atmosphere for each match at Fitzpatrick.
The new stadium would be one of the largest in USL League One, the third tier of American professional soccer below Major League Soccer and the USL Championship. Only four of the 17 venues being used by League One teams seat more than 9,000.
“We know a good thing when we see it. People are giving us the best game-day experience in the entire league,” Schohl said. “We want to make sure it’s big enough, but we do want to keep the feel that you get at Fitzy as you walk around and you see people you know and it’s more intimate. I think that’s a big part of the magic that we have.”
Another priority was the location. The Hearts were committed to staying in Portland and on the peninsula, making their games as accessible as possible for the people in the heart of the city.
Hoffman-Johnson said being able to stay in the city is “massive.”
“(Being) downtown and walkable and visible and all those things is … absolutely critical to the continued growth of this organization,” he said.
Jonathan Culley, a real estate developer and founding partner of the Hearts, began looking at potential sites last fall and came up with a list of 14 locations around Greater Portland, including South Portland, Scarborough and Westbrook.
From the start, however, Cassidy Point was the target. The spot where the stadium will be is currently being used for coal storage, and the Portland City Council adopted an ordinance last year requiring that coal to be removed.
A rendering of the proposed new Hearts of Pine stadium at Cassidy Point in Portland. (Courtesy of SMRT Architects & Engineers)
Culley said the club has an agreement in place with Sprague to buy the land, but declined to provide the price.
“We started open-minded to a lot of different ideas and locations, but we quickly arrived at Cassidy Point as our preferred site,” Culley said. “You probably need 8 acres for a stadium. There aren’t a lot of 8-acre sites on the Portland peninsula.”
Like Hoffman-Johnson, Culley said the location fits perfectly with the club’s interests.
“A location on the Portland peninsula allows us to continue to connect best with our fans,” he said, “and we love the idea that people will be able to come to our games on foot, by bike, by transit. A lot of the suburban locations don’t afford that.”
Frates said the the coal pile is “almost an eyesore,” and that the new stadium will provide a prettier face for the city.
“It’s basically the front entrance to the city, it’s kind of the front porch,” she said. “Now, we have a coal pile, and (we think) how beautiful it will be to have a big space that welcomes community and has multiple uses and is a beautiful campus.”
Frates added that the club will be inviting fan input on what they would like to see in the new stadium, similar to how it held town halls to gauge public feedback before adding its women’s team.
“We’re looking forward to having some input from the community about what they love, what they’d like to see, if they’ve been to other places and they saw something that worked well,” she said. “From day one, Gabe has made that a priority. … We want to make sure we have opportunities for them to give a voice to our new space and our new home.”
A rendering of the proposed new Hearts of Pine stadium at Cassidy Point in Portland. (Courtesy of SMRT Architects & Engineers)
