SoFi Stadium ready to bring Hollywood opulence to Super Bowl

INGLEWOOD, Calif. (AP) — The Super Bowl will come as a culmination of sorts for the NFL’s return to the Los Angeles area, a game featuring the home team that will bring Hollywood glamor to a superstar stadium in Inglewood, where Lakers, Kings and thoroughbreds once thrilled crowds.

“Football was not in LA for a generation,” Rams fan Harrison Bernsen of Los Angeles said as he stood inside SoFi Stadium just before his team beat the San Francisco 49ers for the right to face the Cincinnati Bengals on Feb. 13. “This is how we bring it back in, we use the big games. We host the NFC championship game. We host the Super Bowl. This is our moment. This is LA’s moment.”

Rams owner Stan Kroenke’s sprawling, $5 billion football palazzo that resembles an ocean wave was built to reflect the seaside region around it, and to host the biggest of games.

“When we first drew our first line on paper in 2014, it was for the idea that it would host a Super Bowl someday,” Lance Evans, sports director with HKS Architects and the lead designer of the stadium, said as he sat at the edge of the field. “I can’t wait to see how the NFL, the world stage, the global stage and the fans that are fortunate enough to come and see this building, experience it and the spectacle around it.”

SoFi, which opened mid-pandemic in 2020 and has only had one season of full fan capacity, is staggeringly big — the NFL’s largest stadium in pure size at 3.1 million square feet — while seating more than 70,000, with the ability to accommodate up to 100,000.

Touted as the first indoor-outdoor stadium, its translucent canopy roof diffuses the sunlight and keeps the fans and field cool. Its open sides let in winds from the Pacific Ocean a few miles away.

“When you’re up