SoFi Stadium was built to redefine the NFL experience. Over the next three years, it will test whether a modern venue can redefine global sport itself.
The $5 billion complex in Inglewood is set for an unprecedented run: hosting the FIFA World Cup, a Super Bowl and the Olympic Games, including swimming, in rapid succession. No stadium has ever staged all three. None has done it in consecutive years.
Opened in 2020, SoFi is the vision of billionaire real estate magnate Stan Kroenke and home to the NFL’s Rams, which he owns, and the Los Angeles Chargers. From the earliest planning stages, ambition was part of the design.
“When we first started talking about building SoFi Stadium in Hollywood Park, Stan wanted to host the world’s greatest events,” Kevin Demoff, president of team and media operations for Kroenke Sports & Entertainment, said in an interview at the venue. “We thought that meant Super Bowls, World Cups, hopefully the Olympics when we were dreaming this up in 2015 and 2016.
“If you had said they’d all happen in three consecutive years, that would have been hard to believe. I don’t think any stadium has ever hosted all three, let alone back-to-back-to-back.”
At roughly 3.1 million square feet, SoFi is the largest stadium in the NFL. That scale, Demoff said, was intentional, not just to impress on Sundays, but to allow the building to repeatedly transform to meet radically different demands.
“It can be a great concert venue, a great football venue, or a great World Cup venue,” he said. “It can host something incredible like swimming or an opening ceremony.”
The flexibility will be tested first this summer, when SoFi stages eight World Cup matches, including the U.S. men’s opener and a quarterfinal.
The conversion is substantial: an NFL stadium built for artificial turf and American football sightlines must become a FIFA-compliant soccer venue with natural grass.
Otto Benedict, senior vice president of facility operations, said about 400 seats will be removed from pre-built demountable sections.
The playing surface will be raised roughly 30 inches using a substructure that allows airflow beneath the pitch. A cool-season hybrid grass, grown in Washington state, will arrive in refrigerated trucks.
World Cup capacity will be about 74,000 under SoFi’s translucent roof.
“It’s a limitless building,” Benedict said.
In 2027, the stadium will host Super Bowl LXI. A year later, it will stage the opening and closing ceremonies of the Los Angeles Olympics, and, in one of LA28’s boldest plans, Olympic swimming.
“If you had asked me when we built this whether I ever envisioned swimming in SoFi Stadium, I would have said no,” Demoff said.
The idea gained traction around 2020 or 2021, he said, and was reinforced by U.S. Olympic swimming trials held at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis ahead of the Paris Games, showing a football venue could convincingly become a temporary natatorium.
“The idea that where you’re watching touchdowns today, or where the U.S. scores its opening World Cup goal, could also be where Katie Ledecky is swimming during the Olympics is a crazy thought,” Demoff said.
Hovering above it all is one of the stadium’s defining features: the 70,000-square-foot, dual-sided oval Infinity Screen, the largest 360-degree central video board in the world. Suspended more than 120 feet above the field, it is controlled from a buzzing production room where about 50 people work on NFL game days, supported by roughly 100 crew members operating cameras and redundant systems.
Josh Mark, the stadium’s vice president of broadcast operations and production, called the upcoming stretch rare even by industry standards.
“Working one of these events would be a career highlight,” he said. “We’re getting three in the next three years.”
For Demoff, the ultimate measure will not just be the list of events, but the execution.
“When this run is done, I want people to say the world’s greatest building hosted the world’s greatest sporting events and did it flawlessly,” he said. “And that it represented Los Angeles.”
