Why Sports-Anchored Retail Is the Next Big Bet in Eastern European Commercial Real Estate

By Roksolana Pyrtko, Managing Consultant, Symbol Consulting DMCC

Walk through a shopping centre in Warsaw, Kyiv, or Bratislava and the formula is almost always the same. A hypermarket on the ground floor, a food court upstairs, fashion brands filling the floors in between. For a long time, it worked. Developers across the region built to that template, leased up quickly, and moved on. The model is now showing serious signs of age.

The shift did not happen overnight. E-commerce penetration in Poland reached 8.6% in 2024, according to Cushman & Wakefield, a modest figure by Western European standards but one that has accelerated consistently year on year. The categories most affected — fashion, books, electronics — are precisely the ones that traditionally filled the middle floors of Eastern European malls. Average footfall in Polish shopping centres edged down 1% year-on-year in the second half of 2024, according to the same data. The largest centres held up better than mid-size peers, and the reason is straightforward: scale allows for a more differentiated experience. The smallest, most formulaic assets are feeling the pressure most acutely.

What comes next is already visible if you know where to look. Across Europe, the data is increasingly unambiguous. According to CBRE’s European Shopping Centers Performance Index, more than 80% of the continent’s top-performing retail assets host at least one fitness, healthcare, or wellness occupier. Between early 2024 and mid-2025, centres with these tenants recorded footfall broadly in line with pre-pandemic levels. Those without them continued to lag. The report is direct about the implication: the most successful centres are integrating health-related uses, and the gap between those that do and those that do not is widening.

Eastern Europe is not leading this shift. That is precisely what makes it interesting.

The Sports Opportunity Specifically

Fitness and wellness is a broad category. What Roksolana Pyrtko and the team at Symbol Consulting have focused on — through direct project work in Ukraine and advisory mandates across Central Europe — is the more specific opportunity within sports-anchored retail: professional-grade training and competition facilities as the primary draw, with retail and hospitality built around them rather than the reverse.

The commercial logic is different from a gym chain. A fitness operator drives weekly visits. A genuine sports facility — one capable of hosting academies, competitions, and community programming — drives daily visits, brings families, and creates an ecosystem of secondary spending that a standard gym cannot replicate. A parent delivering a child to football practice three times a week is not waiting in a car park. They are shopping, eating, and becoming habitual visitors to the wider development.

The consumer base for this model is already there, and it is growing. Poland’s sports equipment and fitness clubs market is currently valued at approximately USD 2.5 billion, driven by rising health consciousness and increasing disposable incomes. From 2013 to 2024, Poland recorded the highest growth rate in gym and fitness equipment consumption of any major European market, with a compound annual growth rate of 8.7%, according to IndexBox. Ukraine, despite the pressures of the past several years, has a sports equipment and fitness retail market valued at USD 1.1 billion, with growth driven by increasing health consciousness and the rise of fitness and wellness trends across key cities including Kyiv, Lviv, and Odesa, according to Ken Research.

These are not niche figures. They represent a structural shift in how Eastern European consumers think about their leisure time and how they spend money on it. The retail formats capturing that shift will outperform those that do not.

What the Lease Data Says

Beyond consumer trends, the investment case for sports-anchored retail holds up at the asset level. High-end fitness and sports operators routinely sign leases of 15 to 20 years, providing stable long-term occupancy for landlords, according to analysis published in the National Law Review. Operators in this category also typically use facilities multiple times per week, creating consistent daily traffic and driving spending at surrounding businesses within the same development. For a developer building a business case, those are materially better lease dynamics than a fashion retailer on a five-year term.

Across European retail as a whole, retail park vacancy stood at just 1.2% as of Q3 2024, compared to 5.8% for the broader index, according to CBRE’s European Real Estate Market Outlook. The assets performing best are those with the strongest and most differentiated occupier demand. Sports and wellness sits at the centre of that story.

The rental growth numbers support this too. In Poland, rental growth in shopping centres averaged approximately 15% year-on-year in the second quarter of 2024, according to Cushman & Wakefield, with the strongest performance concentrated in the largest and most experience-oriented schemes. Smaller, undifferentiated centres are not sharing in that growth.

The Development Economics

A common objection from developers in the region is that sports infrastructure is expensive to build and complicated to operate. Both points are true. Neither is a reason not to do it.

The cost of professional sports facilities — high-quality courts, training surfaces, recovery areas — is real, but it is recoverable through a tenant mix that holds value over time. The alternative, filling a development with the same chain stores that can be found in every competing mall within thirty kilometres, is a race to the bottom that the data says developers are already losing.

Poland’s total retail stock reached approximately 16.6 million square metres by Q3 2024, with 102,000 square metres coming on stream in that quarter alone — all of it in the form of retail parks, according to Cushman & Wakefield. The pipeline is not slowing down. What is changing is what the market rewards. Assets that give consumers a reason to choose them over the alternative are separating from the field. Assets that do not are competing on price and losing.

For a developer willing to think at the level of what their project actually is — not just a collection of tenants, but a place people want to be — the construction premium associated with genuine sports infrastructure is an investment in differentiation, not an overhead cost.

The Management Question

Roksolana Pyrtko is direct about where most attempts at this model run into trouble, drawing on Symbol Consulting’s hands-on experience across development, construction supervision, and operational management in the region. The problem is almost never the concept. It is the execution, and specifically the management model.

A sports-anchored retail development is not a mall with a gym. It requires a management structure that understands both disciplines — the programming logic of a sports facility and the commercial logic of retail asset management — and can hold them together without letting either one degrade. The developers who hand the entire operation to a traditional mall management company, or who treat the sports component as a tenant rather than an anchor around which everything else is organised, consistently underperform the potential of the asset.

Getting this right requires advisors who have worked in both contexts, not simply one. The translation between an ambitious development brief and a functioning operational reality in an Eastern European market — navigating planning environments, tenant market depth, consumer psychology, and financing structures — is where most projects either succeed or quietly fail to become what they were supposed to be.

The Window

European retail has been one of the best-performing real estate sectors over the past year, with retail vacancy falling to 5% in mid-2025, the lowest level in a decade, and retail rents increasing by 2.7% over the same period, the fastest rate in at least fifteen years, according to Aberdeen Investments. The macro environment for well-positioned retail is as supportive as it has been in years.

Eastern Europe is participating in that recovery, but unevenly. The assets gaining ground are those with genuine differentiation. The ones standing still are finding that standing still, in a market with a growing supply pipeline and a consumer base with rising expectations, is effectively moving backwards.

The developers who commit now to a genuinely differentiated product — one built around sports, wellness, and experience as primary draws rather than afterthoughts — will define the benchmark for commercial retail in the region for the next decade. The underlying consumer trend is structural, the lease economics are favourable, and the competitive field has not yet moved.

“The window exists,” says Roksolana Pyrtko. “But in real estate, windows have a habit of closing before most people notice they were ever open.”

Roksolana Pyrtko is Managing Consultant at Symbol Consulting DMCC, a Dubai-based advisory firm specialising in real estate development and alternative energy projects across Eastern and Central Europe. Symbol Consulting provides management, marketing, and strategic advisory services from project inception through completion.