World Cup team could call Westfield home; plus, progress reports on downtown projects

In the third consecutive episode with updates on major stories from the past year, this week's IBJ Podcast features IBJ’s Mickey Shuey, who covers real estate, hospitality and the business of sports. In the first half of the episode, Shuey reveals what’s been going on behind the scenes in Westfield as cities across North America prepare to host matches this summer for the 2026 Men’s World Cup. Central Indiana is out of the running as a match site, but Shuey reports in the latest issue of IBJ that Westfield’s gargantuan Grand Park Sports Campus has been named one of the available base camps for teams competing in the Cup. On the podcast, Shuey discusses the logistics of being the home base for a World Cup team, what the teams are looking for and what attribute of Grand Park might make it less appealing. In the second half of the episode, Shuey digs into his notebooks to give us progress reports on many of the major construction projects downtown, including the $600 million overhaul of Circle Centre Mall and the $4.3 billion IU Health hospital campus. Even more intriguing, he addresses significant downtown projects still in the proposal stage: a stadium for the Major League Soccer team the city wants to establish and a casino that would use the gaming license of the Rising Star Casino in southeast Indiana.