United owner says he hopes soccer stadium is built by 2029

New Mexico United will be playing at Isotopes Park for at least the next few years until its new stadium is built at Balloon Fiesta Park.

The soccer team recently signed an agreement to extend its lease at the ballpark until 2029, City Department of Municipal Development spokesperson Dan Mayfield said.

“If we have the will and the way we will have a stadium by then,” United owner and CEO Peter Trevisani said. “But we also need to do it right.”

United’s future 6-acre stadium will be east of the Sid Cutter Pilot’s Pavilion and take about a third of the parking lot it will be built on. Initial plans call for an 8,000- to 10,000-seat stadium, Mayfield said in a news release on Monday.

The stadium will not interfere with the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, which starts this weekend, Mayor Tim Keller said during a Monday afternoon news conference at Balloon Fiesta Park.

“This is already being built in a no-fly zone,” he said. “And a lot of people ask ... ‘How is this going to work?’ ... Look at those power lines. This has always been strictly off-limits.”

The city has hired a contractor who will begin pricing the infrastructure upgrades that are needed for the stadium, Mayfield said.

“We’ll conduct all the site assessments to figure out exactly how we’re going to do this,” Keller said. “... Now, a lot of folks will ask, ‘Well, when is this going to be done, etc.?’ It’s too early to know. Once we actually have the contractor on board and the official architectural renderings then we will have a timeline.”

‘Excited to continue moving forward’

Since 2020, United has been looking for a permanent stadium to replace playing at Isotopes Park, home of Albuquerque’s Triple-A baseball team.

“I don’t think I appreciated how much work it is for the Isotopes employees, as well as our own, to convert a field,” Trevisani said.

United plays in the USL Championship league, which requires its franchises to have dedicated soccer-only stadiums with a minimum capacity of 5,000 in place by 2026. United will not meet that deadline, but club officials have told the Journal that the league is being gracious.

A proposal for building a stadium Downtown using bond funding was defeated in 2021.

Two years later, Balloon Fiesta Park was selected as the location for a privately financed stadium on land leased by the city.

The project had been approved by the Environmental Planning Commission in April 2024. The city’s land use hearing officer upheld the decision in July 2024.

Neighbors were concerned that the stadium would result in noise and light pollution and impact local traffic.

The associations appealed the decision to district court after the Albuquerque City Council voted 8-1 to deny their appeal in August 2024.

In July 2025, 2nd Judicial District Court Judge Erin O’Connell tossed the appeal, the Journal reported.

The city, Keller said, is “certainly considering what the neighbors have requested with respect to light and sound minimization and traffic minimization and so those will all be incorporated in due time into the plan. ... But for right now, we’re just excited to continue moving forward, to take the next steps in a very real way.”

‘Build a better New Mexico’

In February, the City Council approved the sale of a $30 million bond to the United Soccer League club to fund the new stadium, the Journal reported.

Trevisani said he will be talking to companies that do “a lot of modular-type stadiums” then figure out “how we can have a beautiful facility that is, in a way, cost-effective.”

“So that’s going to be a challenge that we’re going to have to solve,” he said.

Once the stadium is built, Trevisani said, United won’t be the only ones using it.

“There are things that we don’t even know that are going to come to New Mexico,” he said. “And so, 20 years from now, we’re going to have more teams. We’re going to have more events. ... I think we could see a women’s team. That will be absolutely possible. It’s going to be absolutely possible to have our youth, our championship games here.

“Think about a senior in high school getting ready for a game in a professional locker room and hearing the crowd and the smoke. And for so many of them, that will be the last high school game they play, and they’re going to be telling their grandkids (about) what it was like when they came out on this field. That’s legacy. That’s how we build a better New Mexico.”