The $5.5 Billion Spaceship

When the United States walk out to face Paraguay on June 12, they will not be playing in a stadium so much as inside a piece of science fiction that somebody actually built. SoFi Stadium in Inglewood is the most expensive sports venue ever constructed, and almost nothing about it is normal. Here is the fun stuff worth knowing before kickoff.

It cost more than three Super Bowls' worth of stadiums combined

SoFi came in at a reported $5.5 billion, paid for privately by Rams owner Stan Kroenke. To put that in perspective, the previous benchmark, MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, cost $1.7 billion. SoFi cost more than three times as much. When it opened in 2020 it instantly became the priciest stadium on Earth, and it still wears that crown.

The field is buried 100 feet underground

This is the detail that breaks people's brains. SoFi sits just three miles from LAX, smack in the flight path, so the FAA would not allow a towering structure. The architects' solution was to dig down instead of up. The playing surface lies 100 feet below ground level, double the depth of any other NFL venue. Crews excavated more than 7 million cubic yards of dirt to carve out the bowl. So when Christian Pulisic lines up a shot, he is doing it at the bottom of what is essentially a beautifully landscaped crater.

There is a video board the size of the pitch hanging over the pitch

Look up and you will see the Infinity Screen, nicknamed the Oculus. It is a doubled-sided, oval halo of LED that wraps the entire stadium, weighs 2.2 million pounds, and packs 80 million pixels across roughly 70,000 square feet. It is the largest video board in professional sports, longer and wider than the field of play itself, and it floats 122 feet above the grass. Fans in the cheap seats can genuinely watch the action better by looking up than by looking down.

The roof is see-through and partly opens

That shimmering canopy stretching over a million square feet is made of 302 translucent ETFE panels, the same space-age plastic used on the Beijing Olympics aquatics center. Forty-six of those panels can open for ventilation, all suspended on the largest double cable-net system in the world. It lets California sunshine pour in while keeping the venue climate-controlled. Indoor comfort, outdoor light.

For the World Cup, you cannot call it SoFi

FIFA has strict rules about commercial names at its tournaments. Because SoFi is a corporate sponsor's name, the venue officially becomes "Los Angeles Stadium" for the duration of the World Cup, existing only inside FIFA's paperwork. The day after the tournament ends, it goes right back to being SoFi. A $5.5 billion building, briefly forced to go by a pseudonym.

They ripped out the turf and grew a real lawn indoors

NFL games at SoFi are played on artificial turf, but FIFA demands natural grass. So groundskeepers laid a specially imported ryegrass and Kentucky bluegrass blend over the top, fed by a layered system of drainage, vacuum ventilation, humidity control, and grow lights that mimic sunlight so the grass can photosynthesize inside a covered stadium. It is one of the trickier engineering puzzles of the whole tournament: keeping a living lawn alive under a roof.

They literally removed seats to make room for soccer

A World Cup pitch is wider than a gridiron field, so to hit FIFA's required dimensions the crews had to physically pull out more than 400 seats from the stadium corners, swapping permanent concrete sections for removable steel ones. Every change is reversible, because the moment the World Cup leaves town, SoFi turns back into a football stadium.

A marquee World Cup venue

SoFi is one of the headline stadiums of the 2026 tournament, hosting eight matches in total: five group games, two Round of 32 knockout ties, and a quarter-final. USA vs Paraguay is the building's grand World Cup kickoff, with the Americans also returning here to face Türkiye on June 25.

So as you settle in for the opener, remember: the players are 100 feet underground, the scoreboard is bigger than the field, the roof is plastic, the grass is a houseplant, and the whole thing is pretending to have a different name. Welcome to SoFi.