The Broncos are upgrading at Dove Valley.
The club on Tuesday announced plans for a new headquarters and training facility, to be built on their current parcel of land. Construction is set to begin in the spring and the plan is to move into the new building ahead of the 2026 NFL season.
The price tag for the project checks in around $175 million, a source told The Post, and the project is privately funded.
“Ownership has been very clear from Day 1 of, ‘Tell us what great looks like,’” Broncos president Damani Leech said. “’How will this help us win on the field and off the field? If you can do the work to show us what great looks like and it’s consistent with our values and goals, they’ll support it with resources.’ It’s been an interesting challenge for us, because for a lot of people — staff, businesses — your governor is always budget and what you can afford. Not to say we have unlimited amounts of money, but the governor here is your ability to define greatness and to do that at an accelerated pace.”
The franchise has been working for about a year through options on whether to renovate the current Centura Health Training Center or to build new. They toured NFL facilities including Chicago, Miami, Las Vegas and Dallas and NBA setups at Golden State and Phoenix, among others. Broncos president Damani Leech told The Post on Tuesday that ultimately the Walton-Penner Family Ownership Group decided a new build could best fulfill their goals.
“The result of that was them saying, ‘We want to do this the right way,’” Leech said. “We want this to be a place our players like being here, our coaches like being here. A number of our staff live in this area.
“Can we stay on this plot of land and build something new that meets our needs in the future?”
They decided they could.
The 205,000-square-foot, three-story building will be built south of the Pat Bowlen Fieldhouse and will connect to that building, which is Denver’s indoor practice facility. The new headquarters will basically be divided by floor: player-centric on the first floor — locker room, weight room, training facility, etc. — coaches and football operations on the second floor and business operations on the third floor.
From the first floor, players will be able to walk out to the practice fields from, essentially, where the berm (training camp seating for fans) is currently.
The facility itself will increase locker room space and overall space each by more than 30%, but Leech said the goal was not simply to get bigger.
“Really the focus was largely about football,” he said. “We’re a football-first organization. How do we put our players in the best position to succeed? Our coaches, our staff, put them in a position to succeed. And then what are the things we see other teams doing? It wasn’t a goal to be the biggest by any stretch. Ownership made that very clear. We don’t want to be the biggest. We want to have the best.”
The first floor, then, is being designed to maximize efficiency for players as they go through a day. Senior vice president of operations Chip Conway and vice president of player health and performance Beau Lowery went on the facilities tours with the ownership group to help cultivate ideas. Coach Sean Payton and general manager George Paton weren’t on the trips but provided their own input. Paton was at Minnesota when the Vikings opened a new facility in 2018.
“He was able to say, ‘Once we got into it, this what we liked, this is what we didn’t like,”’ Leech said. “Sean went through it in New Orleans to some degree and at least had plans for renovations.”
Payton, upon seeing a recent update to the renderings, said he thought there were too many offices and that he didn’t think the size of Denver’s staff would grow so much over the next five to 10 years.
“They were also really wise enough to understand that we need to build with flexibility and not just for growth,” Leech said.
CEO Greg Penner said before training camp started in late July that the club wanted to find a way to stay on the current plot of land, which the Walton-Penner Ownership Group purchased shortly after it bought the franchise last year.
“We love this location. We own the land here,” Penner said then. “This is obviously where we would like to be.”
Another key to this design, then, is that it minimizes operational disruption for the two years of construction. Essentially, the Broncos can stay right where they are until they move into the new building in 2026.
Fans, though, will see a different arrangement for training camp for the next two or three summers.
Leech said the team is going to bring in temporary bleachers south of the practice fields, though until construction bids are finalized and logistics are sorted out, the exact capacity isn’t clear.
Then once the new building opens, the old one will be torn down and a new berm for fans will be built east of the practice fields where the current facility stands.
