The Los Angeles Rams officially opened the National Football League's newest facility, the $5 billion SoFi Stadium featuring a 120-yard ovular video board hung from the ceiling, Tuesday with a non-public ribbon-cutting ceremony, five days before a grand opening – without spectators.
Sunday's first game, between the Los Angeles Rams and Dallas Cowboys will be played without a crowd due to local restrictions imposed because of the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, ABC network affiliate KABC reported.
Rams owner Stan Kroenke, who also is part-owner in the privately financed stadium, said he did not know when spectators will be allowed.
"I don't think when we sat at the drawing board five years ago, we ever conceived that we would open up without fans, but I don't think there's anything about 2020 that any of us ever could have conceived," Rams Chief Operating Officer Kevin Demoff told CNBC.
The stadium in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood, also will serve as home of the Los Angeles Chargers. The Chargers' first game is set for Sept. 20 against the defending champion Kansas City Chiefs.
The Chiefs were to open their season Thursday at home to no more than 15,000 spectators.
The Rams, which played in Cleveland from 1936 to 1945, played in Los Angeles for the next 49 years before leaving for St. Louis in 1995. The team returned to Los Angeles in 2016 and the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The Chargers began in Los Angeles in 1960, moved to San Diego until 2017, when it returned and played in Dignity Health Sports Park, the home of the LA Galaxy Major League Soccer team.
Besides the video board, SoFi Stadium, named for a personal finance company Social Finance, boasts numerous amenities the public will have to wait to see. It has a regular capacity of 70,000 permanent seats, expandable to 100,000, with 260 luxury suites and 13,000 "premium" seats.
The stadium, which sits on 298 acres – three-and-a-half times larger than Disneyland -- features a translucent room with clear panels that surround the stadium that can be opened to allow air flow, which Demoff said will be needed to open amid the coronavirus restrictions.
"If you're going to open up a building in a pandemic, the silver lining is by being the biggest, by being the most modern, by having six times the WiFi capability of any other stadium, we can make this technologically safe," he said. "We can make it very safe for fans to socially distance, without having to change any of our design, and that's the great thing about building the stadium for 2020."
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