Chicago Bears president and CEO Kevin Warren said Friday that the franchise still will not commit to a stadium site without property tax certainty, a position that has defined the team’s stalled Arlington Heights project for more than two years.
Warren spoke at an event billed as “Talking Football With Kevin Warren” in Lake Forest, with interviewer David Sweet. Chris Placek of the Chicago Tribune reported his remarks.
“I think we’ve been very clear, I mean, always, you have to have property tax certainty,” Warren said. “The numbers are too big if you don’t have it, and it’s too uncertain. You have to have a commitment from an infrastructure dollar standpoint. You have to have a really good partner, because regardless of where you build, there are always going to be complications. Things happen.”
The Bears paid more than $197 million for the former Arlington Park racetrack property, a 326-acre parcel in the northwest suburbs, and have pressed for a favorable property tax assessment on it ever since. Warren did not close the door on Arlington Park as the eventual site. He also did not name it as the site, which is roughly where the conversation stood in the spring, when he said he expected clarity by late spring or summer. That window is now closing without a resolution.
The team has simultaneously kept a northwest Indiana project alive; In The Rafters reported in June that the Bears board voted to advance development work in Hammond. Two live sites and no decision is a negotiating posture, not an accident of scheduling, and it is the posture Warren has held since the Arlington purchase.
The one concrete piece of new business Warren offered concerned naming rights. Per Placek, the Bears have already screened Fortune 500 companies and narrowed the list to 50 that, in Warren’s phrasing, “fit the ilk of the Chicago Bears.” That is preparatory work for a building that does not yet have an approved location, which is a reasonable use of time and also a reminder of how much of this project exists on paper.
Warren also expressed disappointment that Chicago was passed over as a 2026 World Cup host city, tying it to the lack of a fixed-roof venue. “We miss out on a lot of events that we should have,” he said. Soldier Field hosted World Cup matches in 1994 without a roof, but the argument tracks with the domed stadium the Bears have consistently said they want to build.
Rookies report to Halas Hall on July 25 and veterans on July 28. The stadium question will still be open when they do.
