Between leaving Mexico and heading back to SE Asia, I had a quick trip in Southern California over Christmas to see family. UCLA and Gonzaga were playing a college basketball game the last day I was there in the new Intuit Dome (the new home of the Los Angeles Clippers), so I bought a ticket a couple of months before my trip.
The game was originally scheduled for 5pm. Then, less than 2 weeks before the game, the time was switched to 1pm. That was strange. But I also saw that the Los Angeles Rams game against the Phoenix Cardinals had been moved to that Saturday. Then I saw the time was set at 5pm. The Rams play in SoFi Stadium, which is literally around the corner from the Intuit Dome in Inglewood. Why not go to both games? So I bought a Rams ticket as well.
The Intuit Dome cost $2 billion to build, and was all financed by Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft who is worth well over $100 billion. SoFi Stadium was built and financed by Stan Kroenke, a successful real estate developer who also married into the Walton Family (the family of the WalMart founder), and that cost over $5 billion. So both stadiums have a combined cost of over $7 billion.
Intuit Dome
The outside of the Intuit Dome is designed to look like the net of a basketball hoop.
The arena is fully carbon neutral. It is blanketed in solar panels which generate most of its energy. What it can’t produce, the Clippers purchase from renewable sources, powering everything down to the electric cooking equipment. Plus, the arena is “naturally acclimatized” so as to use less energy on cooling.
Outside the arena is a full sized basketball court with a huge interactive screen behind it.
By partnering with AiFi, an AI-powered shopping platform, the Clippers have over 40 checkout-free concession stands around Intuit Dome. Fans can easily download an app, create an account, and set up their payment method before arriving to the game. Facial recognition allows them to enter a food market, take any item off the shelf, and walk out instantly. They get charged for what they take, but without standing in line or getting out their debit card.
I had to download the Intuit Dome app before I could access my ticket. I also used the face recognition function. As I was doing it, I didn’t like the concept. But then when I was able to easily enter the arena by basically walking in, and doing the same at the concession stands, I saw the value of it. Everything was really easy and fast.
The arena also has over 1,100 toilets and urinals, three times the league average, to allow fans to return to their seats quicker instead of waiting in long lines. I wanted to take a picture of one of these huge places, but it was being well used when I was there and it definitely wouldn’t have been appropriate.
The indoor concourse is lined with thousands of framed jerseys. There’s one for each high school team in California, which comes to 1,560 in total. I couldn’t find mine, but I saw a few of the schools I played against. Scores of people were constantly stopping to see which schools they could see.
The arena also features a seating section known as “The Wall” which is 51 consecutive rows with no suites positioned on the baseline adjacent to the visitor’s bench exclusively reserved for Clippers fans. The section is similar to the “Yellow Wall” at Borussia Dortmund’s Westfalenstadion in Dortmund, Germany.
The star of the Intuit Dome is the 40,000-square-foot double sided Halo Board dominating the view. It’s a full acre of a quarter billion LED lights. It’s basically 4,000 60-inch TV’s floating in a ring above your head. If you rolled the board out flat, it’s three-times the size of the famous Hollywood Sign.
The arena offers the most leg room in the NBA, whether you’re sitting court side or in the upper bowl. Each seat has a USB port to charge your phone, a built-in controller to play games on the halo, and a decibel meter that gauges the movement and sound of each individual fan. The loudest and rowdiest will be rewarded with discounts on food and merch.
You can see these lights in action in this video.
Oh yeah, and there was a basketball game to be played. Each team got about a minute intro video. Here’s the one for UCLA.
Some of the game action below. It was fun to watch part of the game live and part on the halo.
UCLA ended up winning a fun, tight game 65-62.
SoFi Stadium
And just around the corner is SoFi Stadium, home to the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers.
At 3.1 million square feet, it’s the largest and the first “indoor-outdoor” stadium in the NFL. It’s got an adjacent six-acre lake, an enormous video board hovering over the field like a giant halo and a striking, curved canopy that flashes messages and videos to airplanes overhead.
You can even see the Intuit Dome from the second level.
On the other side of SoFi sits the Fabulous Forum, the former home of the Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Kings. The Lakers won one championship there with Jerry West and Wilt Chamberlain and five with Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. It now primarily hosts concerts.
The website of the architecture firm HKS lists seven surprising things about SoFi Stadium. First, the stadium’s roof doesn’t touch its walls. It’s completely free-standing, hovering above, around and over the massive venue. It’s held up by 37 massive earthquake-resistant columns. The roof is open on three sides, which allows for a fantastic ocean breeze to flow through the seating bowl.
Second, a giant, “seismic moat” up to 12’ wide and 100’ deep encircles the stadium to keep it safe during earthquakes. If there’s a temblor, the roof and stadium move completely independently from one another, separated by the massive moat. If you’re in the canyons and notice a giant paneled door on the north or south side? You’re likely looking at the details around that joint.
Third: who sees the games that are projected onto the top of the stadium’s roof? The 80 million annual passengers who travel through LAX, which is 3.8 miles away. SoFi Stadium is directly in the LAX flight path. That’s why…
Fourth, the field is 100 feet below ground. To keep the structure’s overall height below FAA flight-restricted areas, crews had to dig deep to accommodate the massive, vertical seating bowl for the 70,240 fans who attend events at SoFi Stadium.
Fifth, standing on the field, the quarterback can look to his side, through the seating bowl, and see palm trees. How’s that possible if he’s standing 100’ below ground? There are two landscaped canyons carved down into the east and west sides of the stadium, which bring natural light (and native plants!) down to the lowest public levels of the stadium.
Sixth, it’s not just a stadium. In fact, the 6,000-seat YouTube Theater and 2.5-acre American Airlines Plaza are also under that one massive, swooping roof, which also protects the NFL’s largest stadium.
Seventh, the videoboard’s weight holds the roof down in high winds. Fans love the NFL’s only 4k, 70,000 square foot, double-sided videoboard, called The Infinity Screen by Samsung. Suspended 120 feet above the playing field, it weighs 2.2 million pounds. It’s heavy, and that’s important because SoFi Stadium’s enormous roof can act as a wind sail in a major storm. That’s when the videoboard’s weight comes into play, anchoring the roof.
And, of course there was a game to be played with the Rams hosting the Phoenix Cardinals. The game wasn’t that exciting, the Rams won 13-9. But the stadium was full and the fans were suprisingly loud. It helps that the Rams are in first place in their division after overcoming a horrendous 1-4 start to the season.
The opening with the Rams entering the field.
Some of in the game. It was fun watching the plays live then the replays on the board.
This play was the Rams only touchdown. It didn’t look like the runner made it in, but apparently they ruled he did.
So I was a bit later capturing the celebrations on the video board.
This being Los Angeles, there was an actual short concert at halftime…for a regular season game! Sublime is from Long Beach and has sold over 17 million records, mainly from a bunch of hits in the late 90s.
Since the Los Angeles area has the second largest Spanish speaking population of any metro area in the world, with many of them being from Mexico, the Rams have their own mariachi band. They played before the game and then, before the 4th quarter started, played Cielito Lindo y Querido, which some people consider Mexico’s second national anthem…at least if you’ve seen and heard it when the Mexican national soccer team plays!
Another Southern California sunset behind the stadium.
And one final note: the Intuit Dome will serve as the primary basketball venue during the 2028 Summer Olympics, and SoFi will host the opening and closing ceremonies.