SoFi Stadium

SoFi Stadium is the most expensive sports venue ever constructed in the history of professional athletics. Located in Inglewood, California, just 3 miles from Los Angeles International Airport and 20 miles from downtown Los Angeles, this $5.5 billion architectural marvel is the home of both the Los Angeles Rams and the Los Angeles Chargers of the NFL, sharing the most technologically advanced stadium on the planet under one spectacular transparent roof.

The stadium opened in September 2020 — delayed from its original 2019 opening date due to construction complexities — and immediately established itself as the global benchmark for what a 21st-century sports and entertainment venue should be. Even before the FIFA World Cup 2026, SoFi had already hosted Super Bowl LVI in February 2022 and the College Football Playoff National Championship in 2023, cementing its status as the premier large-scale event venue in the western United States.

For the FIFA World Cup 2026, SoFi Stadium will host six matches — making it one of the busiest venues in the tournament outside of the Final host MetLife Stadium. Los Angeles, the second-largest city in the United States and home to the world’s largest concentration of entertainment industry professionals, provides a uniquely glamorous setting for the world’s most-watched sporting event.

With a total development cost of approximately $5.5 billion USD — a figure that includes the stadium itself, the surrounding Hollywood Park entertainment district, hotel and retail development, and infrastructure improvements — SoFi Stadium’s price tag dwarfs every other sports facility ever built. To put it in perspective, this is more than three times the cost of MetLife Stadium, more than six times the cost of Lusail Iconic Stadium, and more than the entire GDP of several small nations.

The investment was driven by Stan Kroenke, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Rams, who purchased 238 acres of the former Hollywood Park Racetrack site in Inglewood and committed to a privately funded development that would transform a derelict piece of suburban Los Angeles into one of the most valuable entertainment real estate portfolios in the world. The development includes a 6,000-seat performance venue, a 300-room luxury hotel, an NFL Media campus, retail and restaurant space, and more than 25 acres of public parks and open space integrated into the SoFi Stadium precinct.

The sheer scale of investment reflects the commercial logic of the Los Angeles market. The greater LA metropolitan area is home to over 13 million people, hosts more Fortune 500 company headquarters than any US city outside New York, and generates more entertainment and media revenue than any city on earth. A world-class stadium in this market is not simply a sporting venue — it is a content-creation engine, a brand platform, and a commercial anchor for an entire urban district.

SoFi Stadium was designed by the globally acclaimed architecture firm HKS Architects, whose portfolio includes some of the most celebrated sports venues in the world including AT&T Stadium in Dallas and State Farm Stadium in Arizona. For SoFi, HKS created something genuinely unprecedented — a stadium enclosed beneath a single continuous translucent ETFE roof membrane that stretches over both the playing field and an outdoor pedestrian deck, allowing natural light to flood the bowl while providing full weather protection for all 70,240 spectators.

The roof is not merely a practical shelter — it is the defining architectural gesture of the entire building. Stretching 298 acres of total site area, the translucent canopy creates a greenhouse-like microclimate inside the stadium that moderates temperature and glare while preserving the open-air aesthetic that Los Angeles football fans associate with watching sport in the California sunshine. The experience of sitting inside SoFi on a bright afternoon — beneath a glowing translucent sky, surrounded by 70,000 people — is unlike any other stadium environment in the world.

The stadium bowl itself descends 100 feet below street level — an extraordinary engineering decision that allowed the designers to maintain a low visual profile across the flat Inglewood landscape while still achieving the internal volume needed for a 70,000-seat venue. Excavating below grade also provided natural thermal mass that reduces the cooling load required to maintain comfortable temperatures inside the bowl on hot Southern California days.

A double-sided video scoreboard — known as the Infinity Screen — hangs above the center of the field and is visible from both ends of the stadium. Measuring 70,000 square feet of total display area, it is the largest video scoreboard ever installed in a stadium and represents one of the most significant broadcast technology investments in sports venue history. During the FIFA World Cup 2026, the Infinity Screen will provide global television audiences with visual spectacle that no other stadium in the tournament can match.

SoFi Stadium was designed from its foundations as a technology-first venue — every aspect of the fan experience has been engineered around connectivity, personalisation, and digital integration in a way that no stadium built before 2020 could match. The venue operates on a Wi-Fi 6 network with over 4,500 access points distributed throughout the bowl, concourses, and outdoor areas — providing every one of the stadium’s 70,240 spectators with reliable high-speed internet access simultaneously, even during peak usage moments immediately after a goal is scored.

The SoFi Stadium app — available to all ticket holders — integrates mobile ticketing, seat upgrades, food and beverage ordering direct to seat, real-time replay viewing from multiple camera angles, and wayfinding navigation through the stadium’s complex multi-level layout. During the FIFA World Cup 2026, FIFA’s official tournament app will be integrated with SoFi’s venue systems to provide international fans with a seamless experience regardless of language or country of origin.

The Infinity Screen — the centrepiece of SoFi’s technology ecosystem — is not simply a scoreboard. It is a programmable broadcast canvas that can display different content on its two faces simultaneously, allowing the stadium to show replays to fans at one end while displaying live action to fans at the other. During major events, the screen’s resolution and brightness levels are among the highest of any display surface in the world, producing image quality that rivals broadcast television on a surface that dwarfs any existing sports display system.

SoFi’s cashless stadium policy — all transactions inside the venue are processed digitally — combined with its biometric entry system using facial recognition technology allows the venue to process entry for 70,000 fans significantly faster than traditional ticket-scanning methods, reducing queue times at gates and improving the overall arrival experience for World Cup visitors.

Even before the World Cup arrives in 2026, SoFi Stadium has already proven itself as the premier major-event venue in the United States. On February 13, 2022 — just 18 months after the stadium opened — SoFi hosted Super Bowl LVI, in which the Los Angeles Rams defeated the Cincinnati Bengals 23–20 in one of the most emotionally charged Super Bowls in recent memory, with the home-crowd atmosphere generating noise levels that shook the translucent roof above. It was the first Super Bowl played in a new stadium by the host city’s own team since the Miami Dolphins’ era in the 1970s.

The halftime show at Super Bowl LVI — featuring Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, and Kendrick Lamar — was performed at SoFi and watched by over 120 million US viewers, becoming one of the most-watched halftime performances in Super Bowl history. The production utilised SoFi’s Infinity Screen and LED lighting systems in a way that no previous venue could have accommodated, setting a new standard for live entertainment production at sports events.

In April 2023, SoFi hosted WrestleMania 39 across two consecutive nights — a first in the event’s history — drawing over 160,000 total attendees across both nights and generating a record-breaking economic impact for the greater Los Angeles area. The venue’s operational systems, food and beverage infrastructure, and transport networks were stress-tested across back-to-back maximum-capacity events, providing invaluable preparation for the sustained operational demands of a six-match FIFA World Cup run.

SoFi Stadium and MetLife Stadium are the two most prominent venues in the FIFA World Cup 2026 tournament — MetLife hosting the Final, SoFi hosting the quarter-final. Both are the most expensive stadiums in their respective cities, both are shared by two NFL franchises, and both will be converted from synthetic turf to natural grass for the duration of the World Cup. But in almost every other respect, these two venues represent distinctly different design philosophies.

SoFi Stadium is extraordinarily well-connected by Los Angeles standards — a city not known for public transport accessibility. The Metro K Line (Crenshaw/LAX Line) runs directly to Fairview Heights Station, a 10-minute walk from the stadium’s main gates. This light rail line connects to the broader LA Metro network, providing access from downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood, and the Westside without the need for a car. Extensions of the Metro line directly to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) — just 3 miles away — are planned to be fully operational before the 2026 World Cup, making SoFi one of the few major US stadiums with a direct rail connection to a major international airport.

For fans arriving by car, parking on match days at SoFi is extremely limited and is pre-booked through official channels well in advance. FIFA strongly recommends that World Cup visitors use public transport for all SoFi matches. The surrounding Hollywood Park entertainment district — with its restaurants, bars, retail and the adjacent YouTube Theatre — will be operational throughout the tournament and provides a superb pre-match and post-match environment accessible on foot from the stadium.

Los Angeles International Airport is one of the world’s busiest aviation hubs, with direct long-haul connections to over 100 countries. International fans attending World Cup matches at SoFi will find more direct flight options into LAX than into any other World Cup 2026 host city, making Los Angeles the most globally accessible venue in the entire tournament for fans travelling from outside North America.