Skonto Stadium is getting a new owner, and it isn’t football.
Estonian property developer Invego has agreed to buy Skonto Stadium on E. Melngaiļa iela, the company announced on Friday, 23 October. It says football stays for five more years, then the site becomes a new city district linking central Riga with Skanste.
Key facts
- Buyer: Invego, an Estonian developer active in Estonia, Latvia and Portugal
- Current owner: Adventika Group, per the Land Register, Delfi reports
- Price: not disclosed
- Football: stays at Skonto for the next five years, Invego says
- Redevelopment: at least three to five years just to prepare
What will happen to Skonto Stadium?
Football first. “Until Latvian football gets a new, modern home, the current Skonto Stadium will stay with football for the next five years,” Invego founder and CEO Kristjan-Thor Vähi said in the company’s statement.
After that, Invego plans to redevelop. Vähi calls Skonto a stadium that has “served its time” and says Invego has a concept to turn the plot into a major artery between the old part of Riga and the new one, Skanste. Invego already knows the area: it co-developed the Skanstes Rezidences apartments next door with Reterra.
No price, no renders, no floor count yet. Vähi says he has briefed the president of the Latvian Football Federation (LFF), the chair of Riga Council’s City Development Committee and the city’s chief architect.
Where will Latvia’s national team play?
That’s the open question. Skonto, opened in 2000, is where the men’s national team plays its home games these days, and Riga FC use it too.
In February the LFF signed a memorandum of intent with Adventika Group to buy Skonto and rebuild it as the national stadium. Until a Skonto deal is signed, the federation keeps its rights to the Lucavsala land, the LFF said. LFF secretary general Arturs Gaidels has told LETA both options are still being weighed, and which one makes more economic sense will be one of the main criteria, Diena reports.
The council’s City Development Committee chair, Edgars Bergholcs, has floated a third idea: put the national stadium in Skanste next to Xiaomi Arena. Vähi thinks five years is “enough time” to sort it out.
Lucavsala, Positivus’s home from 2022 to 2025, is still on the stadium map. And with Riga apartment prices up 10% this year, a big new district in Skanste would land in a hot market.
Metallica packed 32,000 into Skonto in July 2008. Catch a game there while you still can.
Photo: Skonto Stadium, Riga, 20 October 2025. Bendžamins / Wikimedia Commons, CC0.
