Why SoFi Stadium, world’s most expensive arena, will wow the World Cup and shock soccer purists
INGLEWOOD, Calif. — When a team of world-class architects sat down to design SoFi Stadium, the $5 billion palace that will host Friday’s U.S. World Cup opener, they set a goal that might make soccer purists squirm.
They and Stan Kroenke, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Rams (along with Premier League champion Arsenal and MLS’s Colorado Rapids, among other sports franchises), didn’t simply want a stage for Super Bowls and Olympics. They didn’t just want the most magnificent stadium in the National Football League.
They wanted “something different,” a building with “personality,” one that would co-star with concerts and matches, one that would “be an equal participant to the entertainment,” lead architect Lance Evans of HKS tells The Athletic.
He and his colleagues asked themselves: “Can we deliver awe just like (Lionel) Messi can deliver awe?”
In other words, they designed the antithesis of soccer’s century-old cathedrals, where the game is the only attraction. Where it’s religion. Where it’s everything.
SoFi, the world’s most expensive stadium, and several other NFL venues-turned-World Cup grounds, will wow visitors over the coming month because they’re exactly the opposite.
In the first of 78 stateside World Cup matches on Friday, the U.S. men’s national team will welcome Paraguay to this spaceship-like structure south of Los Angeles. Players will arrive and descend 100 feet below terrain. When they emerge from gleaming locker rooms onto the field, walking past opulent field-side suites, they’ll stare up at a 2.2 million-pound, 70,000 square-foot, 80 million-pixel “Infinity Screen,” a double-sided 4K videoboard that’s the largest in all of sports.
It will grab their attention — and yours. Via 260 embedded speakers, it will pump music and noise into your ears. It hangs from a translucent canopy that covers all 70,000 seats, plus a theatre and multi-acre plaza that “expands the notion of what a stadium is,” as Evans says.
From above, the canopy is fully programmable; embedded LEDs “turn our roof into a television,” Evans explains. It welcomes visitors before they even land at nearby Los Angeles International Airport. Its 46 operable panels can open to release hot air and make you feel simultaneously indoors and outside. There are temperature sensors but also palm trees.
A view from outside SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles (Patrick T. Fallon / AFP / Getty Images)
“It’s a beautiful stadium,” says U.S. midfielder Tyler Adams.
And it offers quite the contrast with his home in the English Premier League, Bournemouth’s Vitality Stadium, a cozy rectangular structure featuring four box-like stands and 11,307 seats.
“It’s crazy the difference,” Adams said.
And it will be crazy for hundreds of players coming to America for the 2026 World Cup.
Many of soccer’s most famous stadiums, from Anfield in Liverpool, England, to La Bombonera in Buenos Aires, are bare bones in comparison. Advertisements and amenities are relatively minimal. They derive their fame from mystique, from the moments they’ve witnessed and the passionate humans they house every other week.
Paraguay’s national stadium, for example, Estadio Defensores del Chaco, is a bowl of buttressed cement with a few rectangular video boards perched atop it. A chain-link fence rings the field. Seats and facades painted red, white and blue, the colors of the Paraguayan flag, give it color. It’s a fortress in part because it is relatively basic, because a fan has nowhere else to look and scream but at the field.
A view of the Infinity Screen inside SoFi Stadium as the venue goes through preparations for the USMNT’s World Cup opener against Paraguay (Henry Bushnell / The Athletic)
At SoFi (known in FIFA’s sponsorless terms as Los Angeles Stadium for the next five weeks), on the other hand, one could look at the Infinity Screen, also known as the “oculus”; or at the digital boards on the facing of every seating level. You could go explore the fauna that “dance in and out of the building,” as Evans says. You could gaze off into the distance at the sprawling Hollywood Park campus, at the man-made waterfall or retail district. Or, if privileged enough, you could duck into the champagne bar or countless other hospitality spaces.
“The fans that come there, they might not all be coming there for the action that’s on the playing field, or the concerts,” Evans explains. “They might be coming for other reasons — because their significant other wants them to come, or they might just want to be hanging out with their friends.”
The architects, therefore, wanted to build a stadium for everyone, with everything.
“When you come to the building, you’re going to have a great experience, whether you’re the hardcore passionate fan that’s never going to leave their seat, or you’re the individual that’s never gonna go to their seat,” Evans says. “We wanted that both to happen, and to allow the venue to feel alive and active in both cases.”
In that sense, they wanted SoFi Stadium to reflect Los Angeles, a city and region that can’t be succinctly defined. They wanted nature but also glitz; and community but also entertainment.
An aerial view of SoFi Stadium and its roof of programmable LED panels (Patrick T. Fallon / AFP /Getty Images)
“Knowing that we would be building in the entertainment capital of the world, in Los Angeles, the spectacle of entertainment meant so much more than sport,” Evans says. “There was this opportunity to align sport, live music, entertainment, the global events on a stage, and kind of amplify the idea of a stadium to the scale and the magnitude and the impact of the city itself.”
In other words, when it fills on Friday, and the following week for Iran vs. New Zealand, and for six other matches over the next month, it will be far more than a soccer venue.
“Our goal here was to design something the world has never seen before, a one of one,” Evans says.
For many first-time World Cup visitors, it will certainly be that.
