Anaheim, Honda Center and the LA28 rehearsal slot: volleyball learns to operate like a business

Honda Center in Anaheim seats close to 18,000. The LA28 organisers locked the venue in for indoor volleyball at the 2028 Olympic Games, and a large international volleyball event has been pencilled in for 2027 as a full operational rehearsal. Anaheim is not Los Angeles. The arena sits roughly 40 km south of the host city centre, beyond a freeway corridor anyone who has driven in Orange County knows by heart. Fans read an address. Event operators read a cost sheet: the arena lease, the sponsorship inventory, the broadcast package, seasonal labour contracts and the maintenance calendar for the cooling plant.

I opened that announcement for the third time. What stayed with me was not the arena's name. It was the word “rehearsal”.

Olympic volleyball runs on a 12-team format per gender, split into pools, followed by a round robin and knockout rounds. One men's or women's tournament means about 26 matches stretched across nearly two full weeks. For a host, that is 26 nights of ticket sales, 26 television productions, 26 mobilisations of referees, medical staff, security, anti-doping officers and hundreds of volunteers. Add beach volleyball at a separate venue, and this sport's operational load at LA28 is no lighter than basketball's.

Olympic qualification still rests on three familiar pillars: the host slot, continental qualifiers and the world ranking. Every match in the international system, from the Volleyball Nations League to continental championships, therefore carries a slice of Olympic value. No fixture is a pure friendly any more. Volleyball has moved from selling matches to selling slots, and slots can be priced.

Above that sits Volleyball World, the joint venture formed by FIVB and the fund CVC Capital Partners in 2026, which holds the commercial rights to the international circuit. When a private venture controls media rights and sponsorship sales, a venue decision stops being purely a technical matter. It becomes a matter of yield per match night.

Honda Center is owned by the City of Anaheim and run by the city's arena management arm. It is the home rink of the Anaheim Ducks, an ice hockey team. Turning an ice rink into a volleyball court means removing the ice, laying a wooden floor, installing the net post system, recalibrating lighting and the suspended display rig. That process is measured in days and dollars, not hours.

The three revenue lines of an elite volleyball match are tickets, media rights and sponsorship. All three hinge on a single variable: the number of broadcast hours that carry advertising value. In the United States, East Coast prime time is 17:00 on the West Coast. If a match tips off at 19:00 in Anaheim, it is already 22:00 in New York. Broadcasters must choose: a late live window, or an early live window with a thin crowd.

Every West Coast organiser faces this arithmetic. It explains why major international events in California tend to push start times to midday or early afternoon. The in-arena crowd loses, the television audience wins. In volleyball's revenue structure, the broadcast side is larger than the gate.

Look only at revenue, though, and you miss the most expensive asset of a rehearsal year. The 2027 event at Honda Center does not exist to turn a profit. It exists to test: the video review system and coach challenge protocol, the capacity of the broadcast technical compound, the shuttle cycle between hotels and the arena, the speed of processing paperwork for several hundred athletes of different nationalities. A rehearsal event is designed to lose money in a controlled way, in exchange for cutting operational risk across 26 real competition days.

I remember the arithmetic I did in 2026, when I surveyed 23 V.League clubs and estimated that each spectator-free round cost teams an average of 450 million dong in ticket revenue. Hai Phong alone lost about 380 million dong per round. The revenue of a small national league and the revenue of an 18,000-seat arena in California sit two orders of magnitude apart, yet the structure is identical: fixed costs, variable revenue, and a break-even point somewhere between the second and third set.

Every match is a disguised merger — it has a balance sheet and shareholder pressure.

The difference lies in who carries the risk. In the V.League, the club does. At LA28, the organising committee, the City of Anaheim, the broadcaster and the federation share it. That sharing is not born of goodwill. It is born of media rights sold in layered packages, each layer held by a partner entitled to ask questions about the schedule.

The stands can be empty, but the shareholder minutes never are.

Fans watch the spike from position four; I watch the person unlocking the arena at five in the morning to check the ventilation system.

There is a widespread industry belief that hosting an Olympics is an automatic boost for a sport. History does not confirm it. After each Games, the sport left behind is usually not the one with the most airtime, but the one that failed to convert television viewers into domestic ticket buyers. Volleyball has a huge global audience and very thin club revenue in many countries. That gap is a real problem, not a communications problem.

The second risk sits in the calendar. The closer the Olympics get, the more matches rights holders want to add in order to ride the attention wave. Athletes have one body. Vietnam's women's national team has in recent seasons played continuously from the domestic championship to the Southeast Asian Games to Asian competitions to the World Championship finals. Tran Thi Thanh Thuy, Nguyen Thi Bich Tuyen and their teammates get more matches, more viewers and more pressure, while the share of revenue flowing back into the development pipeline does not rise accordingly.

A healthy volleyball nation is not measured in medals, but in the number of clubs that do not have to sell their arena to pay salaries.

What is worth noting is that the rehearsal events themselves are becoming products: tickets, jerseys, hotel packages, digital content. If a national league cannot build its own operating capacity and sell that product, it will remain permanently on the receiving end of invitations.

The global volleyball stage is now measured in units of operating capability. Honda Center 2027 will teach volleyball a logistics lesson, and that lesson is only worth anything if smaller federations bother to read it. For Vietnam, the thing to learn is not arena capacity. It is whom you sign with, for how long, and who holds the right to sell the rights. The day a domestic volleyball player can live on the job without a second income — that is the real ticket.