Dick’s Sporting Goods makes a $16 billion gamble | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

In the midst of a historic retail contraction, Dick’s Sporting Goods is thriving. The company had a record-setting year in 2025, bringing in $14.1 billion in sales and closing only a handful of locations.

Despite those huge wins, the retailer isn’t looking to simply coast along for the next few years. Instead, it’s taking a huge gamble on experiential retail by opening upwards of 40 new House of Sport locations, 60 new Field House locations, and 20 new Golf Galaxy locations by the close of 2028.

A recent Morgan Stanley analysis found that Dick’s experiences a disproportionate profit boost from these larger, experience-led formats. With the planned openings, analysts estimate these models could help drive sales north of $16.417 billion by the end of FY2028.

Dick’s is all-in on House of Sport

For the past few years, brick-and-mortar retail has been at a crossroads. Physical stores have been shuttering at a growing rate — one estimate found that upwards of 4,100 shops and restaurants closed their doors for good in 2025 — and many retailers are struggling to bring in the foot traffic they once laid claim to.

The companies that have managed to come out of this retail apocalypse relatively unscathed are the ones who have evolved their physical presence, offering customers immersive experiences, not just racks of clothing.

Dick’s House of Sport and Field House are the gold standard for this type of experiential retail.

The massive spaces boast interactive features including turf fields, rock walls, batting cages, and running tracks, service bays where customers can get their road bikes tuned up or their baseball mitts broken in, and health and wellness centers where customers can focus on recovery.

All of that exists right next to shelves of the latest sneaker drops, aisles filled with the newest gear, and racks stuffed with top-of-the-line apparel brands.

“The whole north star, when we laid this out, was ‘We need to build a concept that will kill Dick’s Sporting Goods,’” Dick’s Executive Chairman Ed Stack told CNBC TV in a 2025 interview. “We need to build a concept, that if somebody else built this store across the street from us, we’re out of business. And that’s exactly what we did.”

The numbers bear this out. Morgan Stanley reports that House of Sport is Dick’s most profitable store format, bringing in an estimated $5.6 million in earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT).

Traditional Dick’s locations come in a distant second with an estimated $2.8 million EBIT, followed closely by Field House stores with an estimated $2.6 million EBIT.

Dick’s Sporting Goods’ House of Sport locations are the company’s highest earnings drivers, prompting a major expansion by 2028.

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Dick’s $16 billion gamble: no reward without risk

The retailer’s $16 billion gamble doesn’t come without risk.

For starters, Dick’s has said it takes about $20 million in next capital expenditures to open a single House of Sport store. That’s no small sum, especially in an era when physical retail isn’t bringing in as much profit as it once was.

Additionally, many House of Sport and Field House stores are located in shopping malls.

Shopping malls have been hit especially hard by the retail apocalypse. The total number of malls in the U.S. declined by 3.08% between 2017 and 2022, according to data from Capital One Shopping. It’s estimated that there may be as few as 900 malls in operation by 2028.

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However, Stack says the company isn’t worried about setting up shop in these fading hubs.

“It hasn’t [been a worry],” Stack told CNBC TV. “We’ve taken an anchor position, and we’ve put these mostly in A and B malls, so we haven’t gone to malls that are truly dying and tried to redevelop them. They’re usually pretty solid malls that have a vacant Sears box… and we’ve redone the whole thing.”

Perhaps Stack is right not to worry. According to recent data from Placer.ai, both indoor and outdoor malls have seen traffic growth over the last two years. In 2025, indoor malls saw a 1.2% uptick in visitors, and outdoor shopping centers saw a 0.5% increase.

Data from early 2026 is even more encouraging, with indoor malls seeing a 4.5% growth and outdoor malls experiencing a 6.4% increase.

If those trends continue, it seems more than plausible that Dick’s 11-figure gamble will pay off.

House of Sport locations opening in 2026-2027

Dick’s Sporting Goods has not released a complete list of their planned House of Sport openings for 2026-2027, but a partial list of confirmed stores includes locations in:

Cherry Hill, NJ
Freehold, NJ
Rockaway, NJ
Greensburg, PA
Niles, OH
Tysons, VA
Raleigh, NC
Live Oak, TX
Amherst, NY
Cedar Rapids, IA
Eugene, OR