By Rory Carroll
INGLEWOOD, California, Jan 13 (Reuters) - SoFi Stadium was built as the NFL's gleaming new palace, but over the next three years it is set to become a global sporting stage - a venue that will flip from World Cup spotlight to Super Bowl host to Olympic spectacle and swimming venue.
Billionaire real estate magnate Stan Kroenke is the driving force behind the $5 billion stadium in Inglewood, which opened in 2020 and is home to the NFL's Rams, which Kroenke also owns, and Los Angeles Chargers.
SoFi has already staged mega events including the Super Bowl in 2022 and six sold-out nights of Taylor Swift's Eras Tour in 2023. Officials said ambition was always baked into the footprint.
"When we first started talking about building SoFi Stadium in Hollywood Park, Stan Kroenke 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 stadium.
"We thought that would include Super Bowls, World Cups, hopefully the Olympics when we were dreaming this up in 2015, 2016."
"Now if you had said that they would happen in three consecutive years, maybe that would have been hard pressed to believe. I don't think any stadium has ever hosted all three, let alone three in consecutive years."
At roughly 3.1 million square feet, SoFi is the largest stadium in the NFL, a scale Demoff said was deliberate - not just to dazzle on Sundays, but to morph, repeatedly, into whatever the sports calendar demands.
"It can be a great concert venue, a great football venue, or a great World Cup venue. It can host something incredible like swimming or the opening ceremony."
WORLD CUP
That flexibility is about to be stress-tested in sequence. This summer, SoFi is scheduled to host eight World Cup matches, including the U.S. opener and a quarter-final.
For the World Cup, the transformation will involve turning an NFL stadium built with artificial turf and around sightlines for American football into a FIFA-sized soccer venue with grass.
On a tour of the field, Otto Benedict, senior vice president of facility operations, said SoFi will remove about 400 seats from pre-built demountable sections and raise the playing surface roughly 30 inches using a substructure that creates airflow beneath a pitch.
The stadium will install cool-season hybrid grass grown in Washington state and delivered in refrigerated trucks. The venue will seat about 74,000 fans under its translucent roof for World Cup matches.
"It's a limitless building," Benedict said.
OLYMPIC SWIMMING
In 2027, it will host Super Bowl LXI, and in 2028, the venue is slated for the Los Angeles Olympics' opening and closing ceremonies. And then, in one of the more audacious pieces of the LA28 plan, Olympic swimming.
"If you had asked me when we built this, did I ever envision swimming being in SoFi Stadium in the Olympics? I would have said no," Demoff said.
He said the idea began to circulate around 2020 or 2021, and that U.S. Swimming Trials staged in Indianapolis' Lucas Oil Stadium ahead of the Paris Games helped demonstrate that a football building could credibly become a natatorium.
"The idea that where you're going to see players catching touchdowns today, or the U.S. score their opening goal of the World Cup, could also be where Katie Ledecky or someone else is swimming during the Olympics is a crazy thought," Demoff said.
INFINITY BOARD
One of the most stunning features of the stadium is the 70,000-square-foot, dual-sided oval Infinity Board, a massive 360-degree central video screen, the largest of its kind in the world.
More than 120 feet above the field, Josh Mark, the stadium's vice president of broadcast operations and production, shows off the buzzing control room, where about 50 people work on NFL game days with roughly 100 crew members overall operating cameras and multiple backup systems, he said.
"Working one of the events we have coming would be a career highlight and we're getting three in the next three years," he said.
"We have a great crew for it."
Demoff said the legacy he wants is not just the list of events, but the execution - that a building marketed as world-class can carry the weight of the world's biggest stages without a stumble.
"When this run is done, I want people to look at SoFi Stadium and 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."
(Reporting by Rory Carroll in Los AngelesEditing by Toby Davis)
