Flyers

Going on a Hard Hat, Lunch Pail Tour of the Stateside Live! Expansion

By Kevin Kinkead

Published: Apr 22nd, 2026 · 1:47 PM EDT

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Comcast-Spectacor and The Cordish Companies invited media to the sports complex on a rainy and crappy Wednesday morning for a walkthrough of the new Stateside Live!, which is undergoing the final stages of an expansion that will be completed next month.

It was one of those things where you have to put on a hard hat, literally, but since we’re a hard hat, lunch pail-type of blog, it felt natural as we snapped some photos for you.

First, there’s an addition to PBR Philly that goes into the backyard. A medium-sized deck with a drink rail overlooks the area below, which includes an outdoor stage and dance floor that will feature “country entertainment programming.” Giddy up:

This upstairs area connects to the new “AVA Rooftop Bar,” which is a two-story, open air type of thing. They use the word “rooftop,” but it technically sits underneath an overhang, so semantics I guess. Either way, it overlooks the new concert stage and has a really nice view of Xfinity Mobile Arena in the distance, which you can’t glean from the renderings that had been previously sent to media:

The AVA lower level also has a huge bar and looks directly at the stage, which is a 5,000-capacity joint with room for 1,000 premium seats. Taking Back Sunday will play a free grand opening show here on May 29th, and they plan to roll out a concert series throughout the summer and into fall. Imagine seeing Pantera here before the Flyers beat the snot out of the Avalanche in the Stanley Cup Finals, Game 1:

Finally, there’s another bar at the entranceway, coming from the arena. This area is going to feature brick from the old Spectrum, which was originally repurposed and used for Xfinity Live! when it opened back in the day:

Speaking freely, I think the updates look pretty cool. People are in the comments joking about $9 beers, fair enough, and we’ll see what prices end up looking like, but when you come at this from a 40,000-foot view, it’s so much closer to what the venue was supposed to look like when it was originally built 15 years ago. The early blueprints showed this massive complex pushing almost all the way up to the arena, but they ended up with a smaller footprint on the corner of the plot.

More than anything, you think about “optionality,” which is the fake word Daryl Morey uses. If you want to drive down to the game, tailgate, and drink the beer you brought with you, you can still do that. That’s not going away. But if you want a different experience, you have that now, too. The old Xfinity had the big common area inside, but it was lacking in outdoor communal space, and that’s changing in a big way. It amounts to 48,000 additional square feet, according to officials. They’re adding more than 600 square feet of LED screens and they built this with $20 million of private money. No public dollars. It feels like a proper use of the backyard area, which was originally going to be the eSports Arena prior to the Fusion sale and Spectacor pivot.

Anyway, Flyers in 4. Go Flyers.