Retailers enter sporting arena

Dubai Sports City, a 50 million sq ft development that will encompass sporting venues, homes and retail outlets is set to be a staple of the Dubailand project. Retail News Middle East spoke to Mr. Balasubramaniam, CEO of Dubai Sports City to find out how retail will fit into the concept of Dubai's premier sporting zone.

RNME: How does retail fit into of Dubai Sports City?

Dubai Sports City is themed on megasports. Essentially it's a city based on sports as participation, education, well being and lifestyle activities. In the lifestyle complement of Sports City comes living, working, and also shopping and retail. In order to make sure that the levels of retail are maintained at Dubai Sports City, we will have five million square ft of footprint dedicated to retail. As the master developers we will own the retail space and will be leasing. There will be four different parts to the retail. The main aspect will be Arena Mall, which will have a leasing capacity of about 1.3 million square feet and will be between the cricket stadium and the indoor stadium.

RNME: Will the mall have a heavy focus on sports?

The Arena Mall will cater for everybody and about AED1.2 billion will be invested in it. It will be a mainstream mall that sells everything. The mall size is 1.8 million sq ft of footprint with a leasable space of 1.3 million sq ft. There will be a 150,000 sq ft hypermarket at the mall and we are currently talking to a number of operators. This particular mall will cater not only for the people who live within Dubai Sports City, which is estimated to be somewhere between 65,000 people. It will also have a family oriented retail section, which is at the northern point, where there will be a lot of family restaurants and other areas offering services such as banking, medical and small service offices.

RNME: Will all of the retail outlets be in Arena Mall?

No, the mall is one aspect of the retail. The second aspect of the retail is the north and the south point. In the southern point, we will have the upscale retail with the boutique hotels, upscale boutique shops as well as the up-scale boutique restaurants.

The third aspect is that within the sports academies area, which will feature the soccer academy and cricket academy and where the retail will be sports centric. This will be sports and sports dedicated retail. Apart from that we will also have community retail centres in the villa community and a few around the residential and commercial areas, specifically to service those areas.

RNME: When did you launch details of the retail aspects of Dubai Sports City?

We launched the retail element of Dubai Sports City at Retail City in Dubai in June. From we have heard, the interest levels are very high from retailers - all kinds of retailers - whether it's sports, hypermarkets, or boutique stores, because you have a captive population within Sports City. Here there is a captive population for the mall. When the footfall is captive, it makes more sense for people to shop close to where they live.

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