"The Chicago Bears belong to more than Chicago."
With that sentence in a letter to season-ticket holders released Monday, Bears president and CEO Kevin Warren removed all qualifiers and asterisks from the team's plans for a new stadium when its lease at Soldier Field runs out: the Bears will move to Arlington Heights, and build a covered stadium on the old Arlington Park property the team purchased two years ago.
Warren's proclamation is an about-face from the splashy proposal he and Mayor Johnson made in April of 2024 that re-imagined Chicago's lakefront Museum Campus around a new domed stadium. In his new letter, he wrote that the team evaluated a number of sites within the city limits, but none were viable.
"Moving outside the city of Chicago was not a decision we reached easily," said Warren, who said the move should be seen not as leaving Chicago, but expanding.
The announcement means the Chicago Park District will lose a marquee tenant it's had since 1971, when the Bears moved from Wrigley Field. It's also a blow to Mayor Johnson, who'd tried to reset the city's relationship with the team.
Warren said the priority for the McCaskey family is to build a world-class stadium that requires "zero state money for construction." That's one asterisk that still remains ... because the team will be asking lawmakers for property tax relief.
The CEO said this is the year to finalize plans for a new stadium, so that the team can bid on a Super Bowl as soon as 2031. We'll see if Springfield sends that into overtime.