How losing a sports team made Desert Diamond Arena Glendale's biggest catalyst for growth
There was no Westgate Entertainment District when Glendale Arena opened midway through the NHL season in late December 2003 as the home of the Arizona Coyotes.
A lot has changed in 20 years, the venue’s name included.
It went from Glendale Arena to Jobing.com Arena (from 2006-2014) and Gila River Arena (from 2014-2022) before Desert Diamond Casino acquired the naming rights in 2022, changing the name of the multi-purpose, 19,000-capacity venue to Desert Diamond Arena.
The Coyotes moved to Arizona State University’s Mullett Arena after the 2021-22 season.
The Arizona Rattlers are moving in this year.
And through it all, the area surrounding the arena has undergone a major transformation. And the arena is what Glendale City Manager Kevin Phelps sees as “the catalyst” for all that change.
'There was virtually nothing on either side of the arena'
“We have a picture of when the arena was being constructed,” Phelps says. “In the background, you can see the support-column pillars for what is now State Farm Stadium. There was virtually nothing on either side of the arena or behind the arena except for the stadium under construction.”
Construction began on the arena in April 2002, shortly after the state expanded the Loop 101, bringing a lot more visibility and access to the area, which was mostly “vacant farmland,” Phelps says.
In addition to bringing millions of dollars annually to the area, the arena has generated $2 billion in private capital investment, allowing Glendale to become a destination city with experiential entertainment options, hotels, Tanger Outlets and plenty of restaurants within walking distance of both the arena and the stadium.
“I wasn’t here when the initial vision took place,” Phelps says. “But I think it would be safe to say that while there were ambitious plans for how the arena would help with restaurants and some development in the area, the explosion of the entertainment district has gone beyond our wildest dreams.”
'Everyone's going to want to play here': Big changes are coming to Desert Diamond Arena
Private investors 'understand the dynamic' of leveraging events
YAM Properties, a commercial real-estate company owned by GoDaddy founder Bob Parsons, purchased Westgate Entertainment District in 2018.
Private investors, Phelps says, “understand the dynamic of people coming to events and spending the entire day, so they’ve been able to leverage both the visibility, the attention and obviously the feet on the ground to help promote and sustain their business.”
He compares it to clusters of car dealerships.
“Car dealers have learned that the more dealerships you have in the same area, the better they all do. One by itself only does so well. Two together do a little better. You put eight or 10 car dealerships in one area, they all do much, much better. That’s what happened with this arena as a catalyst.”
Marta Kenny, director of operations at YAM, says most Westgate tenants are restaurants, which definitely feel the impact of events at the arena and the stadium.
“They work hard to really maximize event days,” Kenny says. “We pride ourselves on being a 365-day-a-year location whether the events are there or not. But the events certainly do help.”
Why losing the Coyotes hasn't hurt the arena in Glendale
When the city announced in 2022 that it was not renewing the Coyotes’ lease, it issued a statement saying that industry experts felt the move would put the arena in position to be even more successful.
“And that clearly has borne itself out,” Phelps says.
They may have lost 41 games, but concerts tend to bring more money to the area than hockey games.
“What we found is that a fan attending a hockey game arrived 30 to 45 minutes before the game, bought their food and beverage inside the arena, and when the game was over with, got inside their car and went home,” Phelps says.
A concertgoer is more likely to make a day of it.
“They’re getting to the entertainment district in the afternoon,” Phelps says. “They’re meeting friends. They’re having lunch. They’re going to the bars. That one person going to a hockey game is not spending the same amount of money as that one person coming to a concert.”
Cutting ties with the Coyotes also gave the arena more freedom to schedule events.
Dale Adams is the general manager of the arena through ASM Global, a venue-management company with more than 350 venues worldwide.
“We’re wide open now,” he says. “Now, we can say ‘Hey, play here. You can have a move-in day.’”
Desert Diamond Arena had a record-breaking 2023
The arena is coming off a record-breaking year, from number of events to total attendance and gross ticket sales, while also seeing a dramatic increase in merch sales.
The arena welcomed a total of 450,000 guests in 2023. A capacity crowd made Zach Bryan the highest-attended concert ever while a two-night stand by Drake became the venue’s highest-grossing concert and its most successful two-show to date.
That’s two record-breaking years in a row for the multi-purpose venue, placing it among the top performing arenas for ASM Global.
And what’s good for the arena is, as always, good for Glendale.
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How Westgate is 'Arizona's entertainment destination'
“This is Arizona’s entertainment destination, I would say, because of everything we have here,” Adams says.
“You’ve got the casino. You’re gonna have VAI, Mattel Adventure Park. You’ve got retail with Tanger Outlets. You’ve got YAM running Westgate. It’s easy to get here on the 101. It’s got everything. And it’s still growing.”
State Farm Stadium is obviously capable of pulling in much bigger crowds, and when it comes to visibility, it’s hard to beat Taylor Swift launching a stadium tour with two sold-out performances. It’s also hosted several Super Bowls, including last year with Rihanna as the halftime entertainment.
As Phelps says, building the stadium “brought the NFL team, which meant that at least eight times a year, there was gonna be a national broadcast taking place from Glendale.”
On the other hand, because it is a smaller venue, an arena offers greater frequency of big events.
“If you’re a restaurant or even a hotel, if you’ve got 20 event days a year in the stadium, it’s pretty tough to keep your lights turned on the other 345 days a year,” Phelps says.
“In and of itself, a stadium doesn’t drive that kind of benefit to the businesses that need revenue day in, day out, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year.”
And the arena draws significantly more foot traffic to the area each year.
“I think I saw an estimation that there will be around 600,000 fans attending 10 Cardinals games this year,” Phelps says. “And this is a two-year-old number, but Westgate figured it gets about 5 million people a year.”
Last year, City of Glendale officials approved a $40 million renovation plan with ASM Global as part of a multiyear strategy to continue to increase the venue’s fiscal returns and prominence in the city’s growth as a national entertainment hub.
“The real benefit of the arena is the business that it generates for all the businesses surrounding it,” Phelps says.
“When they announced that they had record ticket sales, record attendance, the real benefit for the City of Glendale is that means we have that many more people in the entertainment district. So it’s benefited our hotels. It’s benefited our experiential places like PopStroke and Chicken N Pickle and it certainly has benefited all the restaurants in the area.”
Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495. Follow him on X, formerly known as Twitter, @EdMasley.
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: How Desert Diamond Arena made Glendale an AZ entertainment destination
