Honda Center and the LA28 Rehearsal: World Volleyball Bets on Anaheim

Honda Center sits in Anaheim, California, opened in 2026 and serves as the home arena of the Anaheim Ducks. In hockey configuration it holds roughly 17,000 seats; laid out for basketball it approaches 18,000. The LA28 venue plan places the entire indoor volleyball programme, men's and women's, in that building between 14 July and 30 July 2028. What caught my attention was not the Olympic signage that will hang above the entrance. It was the fact that Volleyball World and the LA28 organising committee will push a real international tournament into that same arena before the opening ceremony, as a full-system rehearsal: ticketing, broadcast feeds, team transport, statistical data flows and merchandise sales.

Every match is a merger in disguise, with a balance sheet and shareholder pressure attached. An Olympic rehearsal sits a tier above that: it is a prototype for a four-year commercial vehicle where a global sponsor, a local broadcaster and a national federation all sit at the same table.

Who actually owns a volleyball evening

Elite volleyball does not run on federations alone. In 2026 the FIVB moved its commercial operations into a joint venture called Volleyball World, with CVC Capital Partners holding a minority stake. That structure dictates how every event is packaged: media rights sold by territory, hosting rights sold by city, title rights sold by product category, and statistical data turned into a licensable asset.

For an Olympic Games, a second layer appears: the local organising committee. LA28 controls infrastructure, security, transport and permits. The FIVB controls competition rules, referees and rankings. Volleyball World controls images, broadcast and commerce. The two sides sign something closer to an operating agreement than a sporting one.

Within that structure, a rehearsal is a mandatory capital outlay. You cannot test a multi-camera system, ball-tracking technology or anti-doping procedures for the first time on Olympic opening day. Fail once there and the damage lands on a rights contract, not on a scoreboard.

Olympic qualification is a market, not a list

Olympic volleyball offers just 12 berths per gender, allocated through continental qualifiers, world qualifiers and the FIVB ranking. That means every match in an international event during the four-year cycle carries ranking points convertible into an Olympic ticket, and therefore into national federation sponsorship.

This is where Vietnamese fans typically miss the story. A win at a continental event is not merely a win. It is a line in a federation spreadsheet, where ranking points decide entry to major events, entry decides how many matches get broadcast, and broadcast exposure decides the commercial value of the team itself.

I started with a World Cup breakdown video on a self-run channel, and I have ended up dissecting an entire industry. The night I edited that analysis of Joachim Löw in a room in Hai Phong, I thought only about tactics. Years later I understood that every tactical breakdown has to sit beside another question: who pays for this evening, and what do they expect back.

Anaheim was not chosen for beauty

Southern California has the densest sports infrastructure in the United States. Within roughly 60 kilometres of Anaheim sit arenas belonging to two NBA franchises, a Major League Baseball stadium, an NFL stadium and dozens of youth training facilities. That means event operations staff, medical crews, broadcast technicians and hotel inventory already exist and do not need to be built.

For an organising committee, everything that does not need building is a direct saving. For Volleyball World, a venue with a large existing bowl, a hanging screen system and experience hosting hundreds of events is an asset that can sell tickets on day one.

Something similar happened at recent Games. Paris 2026 placed indoor volleyball in an existing facility in the south of the city and beach volleyball at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. The essence of a modern Olympic budget is reuse over construction, because newly built infrastructure is a loss that stays with the city long after the crowds leave.

What the rehearsal is really testing

Three things get examined at an event like this.

The first is the broadcast feed. An elite volleyball evening requires multiple cameras, a dedicated referee camera, serve-speed measurement and real-time graphics software. Every signal path must be tagged, encoded and delivered in the exact package a broadcaster purchased. A frame out of sync during an Olympic final can become a contract dispute.

The second is crowd flow. Capacity does not equal ticket sales. A hockey arena has a steep seating bowl, and for volleyball the distance from the front row to the sideline can produce sightlines far worse than a purpose-built volleyball hall. Organisers need real data on where spectators sit, how they move and when they leave.

The third is on-site commerce. Beer, water, jerseys, scarves, photographs. In a building of nearly 18,000 seats, a few extra dollars per head on merchandise becomes a forecastable revenue line, and that forecast is what sponsors want to hear before signing.

Based on my experience tracking matches and transfer windows, most of the value in a sports event never appears on court. It sits in things that never reach a scoreboard: beverage supply contracts, transport contracts, hotel contracts and the right to monetise audience data for years afterwards.

Ticket pricing is a physics problem, not an emotional one

An arena has a finite seat count. With 18,000 seats and three sessions a day during pool play, total ticket supply over a single week reaches into the hundreds of thousands. That creates a paradox: to fill the bowl, organisers must price low for general fans, but to maximise revenue they must price high for corporate buyers and hospitality packages.

The common solution is tiering. A low-price general tier to keep the stands looking full. A group tier sold to amateur clubs and schools. A hospitality tier sold to companies with food, parking and private access included. The top tier is sponsorship packages with seats attached, and those seats usually never appear on public sale.

For an Olympic rehearsal the tiering is harder, because organisers do not yet know which teams will play. Selling tickets to an event without knowing the participants is a pure risk calculation. That is why these events typically sell by session rather than by fixture.

What this means for Vietnamese volleyball

Here the story leaves California and returns to Asia.

Vietnam's women's team entered the group of nations eligible for the World Championship after the FIVB expanded the tournament to 32 teams from 2026. The squad has attackers known beyond its borders: Tran Thi Thanh Thuy has played in Japan's league, while Nguyen Thi Bich Tuyen is the primary offensive weapon. That is genuine progress, and it raises a question entirely separate from tactics.

When a national team starts appearing at commercially valuable events, pressure shifts from the coach to the federation. Who holds the image rights to a match? How is gate revenue split between host and federation? What percentage of personal sponsorship goes to the player? None of this appears in a coaching manual, yet it determines how long that team survives.

I once surveyed 23 V.League clubs during the period when competitions had to be played behind closed doors. The estimate showed each matchday lost roughly 450 million dong in gate revenue on average, with the Hai Phong club losing about 380 million dong per matchday. 380 million dong per matchday sounds like the income of a wealthy club, until you see the other side of the payment sheet: payroll, travel, stadium rental, accommodation, medical costs.

Empty stands but never an empty shareholder meeting — that is what the pandemic taught football people. A team can win on the pitch and still lose money. A league can be broadcast live and still run at a loss.

The contrarian view: a rehearsal creates no long-term value by itself

There is an optimistic reading of Honda Center hosting a rehearsal: it proves volleyball now sits alongside major sports inside the Olympic system, with its own infrastructure, its own schedule and its own broadcast window.

There is another reading I think needs saying. A rehearsal only proves the operating system works. It does not prove the sport has a sustainable financial base. After the Games close on 30 July 2028, Honda Center returns to being the home of the Anaheim Ducks. No international volleyball event stays automatically. No broadcast contract renews automatically. All the value generated in those two weeks depends on whether somebody turns it into an annual product.

The lessons from previous Games are harsh. Many host cities built beautiful arenas, delivered successful tournaments, then left the facilities in financial difficulty within five years. For sports with dense professional league structures such as basketball, keeping an arena busy is far easier. For volleyball, the domestic league system in the United States is not deep enough to fill a large arena's calendar.

This is also the point Vietnamese sports executives should read carefully. We confuse peak events with durable platforms. A match with 10,000 spectators is an event. A league with 10,000 spectators every week for six months is a platform. Only platforms pay wages.

Short-term passion and long-term value

Money in this industry flows on two different rhythms. The short rhythm belongs to events: tickets sold out in days, high broadcast ratings, sponsorship arriving within three months. The long rhythm belongs to systems: academies, youth leagues, three-year broadcast contracts, school relationships and an audience database built one match at a time.

Most bad decisions in Asian sport come from spending long-rhythm money to buy short-rhythm results. Buying a place at a major event without a selection system underneath. Signing a large sponsorship without a sales department. Hiring an expensive foreign coach without the data for him to work with.

The Rimario Gordon transfer I once broke exclusively in late December 2026 is a small-scale example. The value of that deal was never in the fee; it was in the handshakes that happened before the terms were drafted. The same logic applies to volleyball: most of the value of an international berth is decided before the referee blows the whistle.

If I were the decision maker

If I sat in charge of a national volleyball federation, I would use an opportunity like Honda Center to do three specific things.

The first is to buy the signal production rights for matches involving my national team. Not broadcast rights, but the right to produce the original footage. With original footage you can resell to multiple platforms, cut short-form content and control how your team appears on every screen.

The second is to build an audience database rather than a follower list. Followers are unknowns. Ticket buyers are data, and data can be sold to sponsors.

The third is to negotiate revenue sharing with players before image value rises, not after. Once a player is famous, the cost of negotiation multiplies and goodwill shrinks.

A healthy volleyball nation is not measured by medals but by how many clubs do not have to sell their stadium to pay wages.

Closing

Honda Center will host a volleyball evening before the 2028 Olympics, and that evening will be captured in thousands of frames. Most of them will serve internal reports rather than broadcast. What the public sees is a match; what happens behind it is an audited financial stress test.

For Vietnamese fans following every match of the women's national team at continental events, the interesting question is not which teams will play in Anaheim. It is whether, over the next four years, anyone in Vietnam will own the images, the data and the story of their own national team.