(05-17-2023 12:47 PM)Frank the Tank Wrote:  

(05-17-2023 11:53 AM)kevinwmsn Wrote:  maybe 35k is the initial size and there are several upgrades on seating they can do down the road?

With the new Chicago Bears stadium in Arlington Heights, there has been a lot of talk here about the hope of vastly increasing the stadium size capacity (as Soldier Field has the smallest capacity in the NFL besides Indianapolis), but the interviews with architects about the economic realities are instructive.

Essentially, it costs exponentially more for each additional row of seats that you add to a stadium. The land footprint and foundation need to be expanded, the exterior and interior walls have to be longer, etc. - it’s like how a snowball gets bigger where each additional roll requires more and more snow (and in a stadium context, more materials and land).

Yet, the economic problem is that those additional seats generate less revenue because they’re the cheap seats that are farther away. The most expensive seats to build (the ones on the outer rim of the stadium) are the least valuable tickets to sell, so teams are rationally reducing the size of the outer rim in new stadiums.

That means that the modern indoor NFL stadium revenue maximization capacity has settled to around 65-70,000 seats.

I don’t think it’s an accident that the new college stadium proposals are generally settling around 35,000-40,000 seats. That seems to be the sweet spot for the non-mega brands to maximize revenue while holding construction costs in line. Expanding capacity increases costs exponentially but doesn’t bring in a corresponding increase in revenue because those are the cheapest seats in the stadium.

Yes, Ford Field, the home of the Detroit Lions, has a capacity of 65,000. What Ford Field doesn't have though are the very nice field suites like the more recently constructed Vikings and Cowboys stadiums do.