Guatemala City is building the largest indoor arena in Central America, and it comes with a marquee name attached.
HKS Architects, the firm behind SoFi Stadium and AT&T Stadium, has designed Foro Futeca, a fully enclosed, 21,000-seat sports and entertainment forum that will anchor the sprawling Distrito Futeca development on the site of the former Estadio del Ejército. It is billed as the region's first purpose-built, world-class indoor venue, and it broke ground as part of a district-wide groundbreaking in April 2026.
The roughly 2.7-million-square-foot arena will seat 21,000 in a FIFA-compliant sports configuration and expand to as many as 35,000 for concerts, all beneath a full roof covering both the stands and the pitch, a rarity in a city whose rainy season runs May through October and limits the events it can reliably host. Designed with local studio AS Arquitectura, the venue spans 15 levels and is engineered to shift between sport, concert, convention, and cultural modes. Wrapping the main bowl are ten above-ground levels holding nightclubs, lounges, offices, coworking spaces, retail, galleries, exhibition halls, an amphitheater, and an auditorium, a building meant to stay active day and night, not just on game day.
HKS drew the arena's organic envelope from Guatemala's volcanoes, whose ridges and contours shape the building's exterior and its movement inside, while the interiors ascend from dark, grounded tones at the base to lighter, luminous palettes at the top, so guests moving up through the luxury levels feel the climb of a volcano.
The team also had to solve for the setting itself: the city sits on a volcanic plateau at altitude, creating a wind environment that had to be addressed aerodynamically, and the venue simultaneously satisfies Guatemala's local building code, international IBC standards, and FIFA category requirements across its 15 levels.
The broader Distrito Futeca masterplan, developed by Futeca Corporación under a 50-year lease, is a roughly $350 million, 380,000-square-meter project spanning seven city blocks between Zonas 5 and 10, pairing the arena with the Galería Futeca shopping center and a 150-room hotel around a central public plaza. Symbolically, the two main buildings are conceived as volcanoes and the plaza between them as a valley, a nod to the Guatemalan landscape rendered at urban scale.
More than 70% of the arena's premium suites were sold before construction began, and developers report the shopping center is over 90% leased. Construction of the arena is scheduled to begin in early 2027, with completion targeted for mid-2030.