CBS News Philadelphia's Pat Gallen sat down with Philadelphia 76ers owner Josh Harris and Comcast CEO Brian Roberts about the proposed new arena and the legacy it'll be built on.
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What Josh Harris said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Josh Harris, cofounder of Apollo Global Management and owner of the Philadelphia 76ers, discussed the development of a new arena in Philadelphia with Comcast CEO Brian Roberts. Harris emphasized the partnership's goal to create an arena that honors the Spectrum's legacy while being the best in the world for basketball and hockey. He highlighted the importance of a home-court advantage, including sound design and visitor seating, to benefit the Sixers and Flyers. Harris detailed the collaborative effort and the decision to keep hockey, basketball, and concerts together, which he called a huge win for the city. He mentioned that the arena will be privately funded, with private funding being non-negotiable. Harris also noted ongoing work on details like suite configuration and plans for a sales center opening mid next year, as well as standing up a WNBA team.
Key takeaways
Apollo and Comcast are building a new arena on the Spectrum site in Philadelphia, honoring its history while being the best in the world.
Keeping the Sixers, Flyers, and concerts together was a huge win for the city and fans.
A WNBA team is being stood up, with details on their venue still to come.
Gentlemen, thank you for sitting down. This is obviously a big day for both of your respective franchises. Can you kind of walk me through what the last few weeks and months have been like leading up to this?
Well, I would start by just saying how excited we are to be partnered with Josh and his incredibly talented team, and I think they've done a great job. Once we formed a partnership, it's been nothing but spectacular innovation, pushing each other and trying to come up with what we're showing today as the finest building hopefully anywhere in the country and in the world. And that's been, you know, working together. And the idea is for our fans and for our city to have the largest private investment ever done in Philadelphia's history. And I can't wait for us to get started. So, thank you Josh and to all your team and to David Adelman and everybody else that's worked on it and Dan Hilferty and we just are lucky to have the team we have.
Yeah. Look, the coming together of, you know, Comcast and Brian and Dan Hilferty and ourselves has been an incredible positive. And what it's resulted in is what I hope is going to be an arena where we're going to create, you know, memories, right? And I just I remember walking into the Spectrum as a 10-year-old kid with my grandfather and being awed. And that's what we hope to do here is we hope we're going to create, you know, we're honoring the past of the Spectrum and you know what you go through is you go through a lot of details, right? And we looked at, you know, many, many renderings and we all literally saw this one rendering. We're like, that's the one. Unfortunately, it was the most expensive one, but that's our problem, right? But that's what you do, right? You're in it to kind of really wow people on the outside. And, you know, for us, like honoring the Spectrum and honoring, you know, the Flyers and the Broad Street Bullies and Dr. J and Moses Malone and Charles Barkley and all those battles and, you know, and kind of our own memories, right? Was important, but also creating the best arena in the world in terms of ingress, egress, food, kind of like where the seats are located relative to the court or the ice. You know, every little detail, right? So, I think that's what we've been doing and it's a lot of work. You're literally building a house for 20,000 people four days a week and you're doing it on behalf of a city that we all know has opinions and has strong points of view and so we've been hard at work trying to figure it out and to get to this point.
Well, that's a great question. We said it has to be the best hockey arena in the country and the best basketball arena and that was the core agreement in the partnership. Now, how to make that actually happen required going and looking at every one of those buildings and having a team that agrees that we're not for one, we're for both. And they've honored that brilliantly. And Josh and David, they had an idea of let's make it an homage to the Spectrum. We're going to build on the site of the Spectrum. Well, obviously for Ed Snider, who had a big influence on my dad and myself and Dan's life, and all of us who were sports fans in this city. So, it's a perfect coming together and the Rocky steps when you come in to the feeling of the intimacy of the Spectrum. And we both had the chance to watch many games at the Palestra and that feeling was what we told the designers we were looking for yet make it super modern like what Comcast has done with our technology center and our offices and use video and we're so excited about we're going to put our name on it. So, this is one of the great partnerships and projects that I think will help transform the evolution of the sports district in Philadelphia. And if you look at some of the videos back in the day of that stadium and the Spectrum and where we are and where we're going, it makes you proud to be a Philadelphian.
And for us it was all that, but also make it a place where our fans and our players want to come and opposing fans, including Knicks and Rangers fans, by the way, and opposing players fear to come, right? So, make it an advantage to the home team. Make it a home court advantage. Make it a home ice advantage. And, you know, thinking about like, you know, the sound, you know, where you locate visiting fans, the seats. I mean, there's a whole story about that, but at the end of the day, right, that's what it is. And so, it's about a great place for our fans to come and enjoy themselves and a great place and about attracting incredible players. They're going to, you know, hopefully win, win, win for the city.
6 more exchanges in this transcript
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Harris, J. (2026, September 8). Sixers owner, Comcast CEO promise world-class arena that matches the passion of Philadelphia [Interview transcript]. CBS Philadelphia. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1352928/
MLA
Josh Harris. "Sixers owner, Comcast CEO promise world-class arena that matches the passion of Philadelphia." CBS Philadelphia, 8 Sep. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1352928/.
BibTeX
@misc{harris2026_1352928,
author = {Josh Harris},
title = {Sixers owner, Comcast CEO promise world-class arena that matches the passion of Philadelphia},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, CBS Philadelphia. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {sep},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1352928/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
