This $2BN Stadium Could Land Nashville the Super Bowl

Video hosted by Fred Mills. This video contains paid promotion for FlexiSpot.

WITHOUT doubt the Super Bowl is one of the biggest events on earth.

Once a year, every year, one team is crowned champion, another leaves heartbroken, and the majority of us sit at home critiquing athletes over physical feats we couldn’t even dream of attempting.

The stadiums that host this iconic game are a glorious combination of sporting excellence and engineering mastery but over in Nashville, since opening Nissan Stadium in 1999, the Titans have never hosted the NFL’s season culmination and while they stay in their current arena, that’s never likely to change.

Hosting the Super Bowl can earn a city crazy money - as much as $1 billion in visitor spending and employment - and so the city of Nashville is making a Hail Mary play to host the showcase game.

The Titans are building a brand new state of the art facility with the biggest public investment for a stadium in American history.

The problem with Nissan Stadium

Nissan Stadium has welcomed a lot of famous faces through its doors.

Whether it’s hosting Brock Lesnar and Ronda Rousey for the WWE SummerSlam or musicians like Taylor Swift and Luke Combs, it’s one of Tennessee’s most iconic venues.

But nothing is more synonymous with the arena than football.

For the last 26 years, nearly 70,000 fans have flooded the stands each gameday to watch stars like Eddie George, Bruce Matthews and Steve McNair.

However, the Super Bowl has evaded the Nashville franchise - both in playing and hosting - and that’s because there’s some key criteria an arena has to meet to be deemed up to the task.

• Media amenities
• Gameday temperature of at least 10 degrees celsius
• Space for the NFL Gameday Experience
• Ample hotel space and parking nearby
• General stadium quality

When you compare Nissan Stadium with newer venues like SoFi and Allegiant, its age starts to show but ultimately, the main factor getting in the way of its ability to host a Super Bowl is the weather.

Above: Nissan Stadium was opened in 1999 and has never hosted the Super Bowl.

There's a key point of difference when comparing Nissan Stadium to the four most recently opened NFL grounds - it doesn’t have a roof.

In February 2025, Nashville dropped to a daytime low of -4 degrees celsius, well below that 10 degree celsius target.

The franchise looked into renovating the venue to drag it into the modern day but the costs associated with upgrading the old infrastructure were astronomical - so astronomical, in fact, that a new stadium made a whole lot more sense.

Nashville is throwing caution to the wind by building a $2.1 billion facility: new Nissan Stadium.

Above: A render depicting new Nissan Stadium. Courtesy of MANICA.

A bright future

New Nissan is still under construction next to the current arena but it’ll blow the original away.

For starters, it has a roof - it’s a cable-stayed design supported by 50 ring beam boxes.

Cables then stretch across the span of the stadium, bolstered in the middle by a series of posts to create the overall structure of the roof.

It's supported by a superstructure fabricated from 19,000 tons of steel, creating 25,000 individual steel pieces.

Above: The new Nissan Stadium roof features cables and posts to support the weather-proof ETFE panels.

Working around the clock, seven cranes hoist these massive pieces of steel up so they can be bolted and welded into place.

The final piece of this impressive roof jigsaw is 660 feet of translucent ETFE or ethylene tetrafluoroethylene panels.

You can see them at SoFi and Allegiant and they’re interesting for a few reasons. Keith Robinson is the principal and creative director for MANICA, the studio behind the stadium's design:

“There’s a push in the States specifically to leverage ETFE roofs and if you trace back the decision making as to why those make sense, they're extremely lightweight, one of the best ways to cover the long spans that we’re going for and they also maximise daylight."

"As these venues novate from being exterior driven and open to the elements to indoor conditioned facilities, for the longtime you had to give up the daylight to go with that. ETFE allows you to provide a sort of naturally lit environment.”

They protect from UV rays, the weather and because they’re non-stick, they don’t really get dirty.

But, most importantly, in comparison to materials like glass or metal, they’re incredibly lightweight and so massively reduce structural load.

Beneath that impressive roof is a concrete frame and block walls to support all of the elements that make a great venue. Kellen DeCoursey is the project executive for the Titans, tasked with overseeing the construction of the entire stadium:

“The structural frame, the superstructure, is a hybrid design. We made a really detailed decision early on that the best thing to do was take concrete out of the ground and get us all the way to the upper concourse and then transition to steel.”

That approach meant concrete could be poured on site straight away without having to wait for prefabricated steel to arrive but the engineering of the stadium matters a lot less to most fans than their seat.

Above: The structural elements of new Nissan Stadium are rising, ready for opening in 2027. Courtesy of Tennessee Titans.

Fan-centric design

The fan experience has been a key consideration with the design of new Nissan Stadium and while it's definitely bigger, it'll have 10,000 fewer seats in the stands than the old ground.

The logic behind the 60,000 seating plan is that fewer seats means a more intimate experience; we’re told there won’t be a bad ticket in the house.

Gone are the nosebleed seats from which you can just about make out a few tiny figures that might be playing football.

Instead, each ticket in new Nissan Stadium will be 38% closer to the field than in the previous arena and that’s created a unique square shape for the whole project, as Robinson explains:

“A football field is rectilinear and an NFL building is commonly rectilinear in its form. In this case, when we laid the building on the site in the very early test fits it was pretty clear that there was a more comfortable way to set the building on the site but it meant one half of the building’s premium was on the freeway side and not facing downtown."

"We ended up rotating the building 90 degrees and on the ends we basically chopped off a lot of the length of the building and made it more square. When we did that it ended up pulling the end zones even closer. It means that as the seating bowl wraps around the field, you’ll notice it sort of shoots across and everybody is pulled tighter in the end zones.”

Despite the lower capacity, revenue is projected to soar because fewer seats in a larger space offers the opportunity for more luxury.

The stadium will feature 130 stunning suites and while that’s 13 fewer than the old venue, the new facility will boast an all-inclusive club and 126 studio boxes for gameday goers looking for an upgraded experience.

The structure consists of 12,400 steel beams, 1,600 glass panels, 77,000 square feet of LED displays so you don’t miss any of the action - or the ads - 44 escalators and 27 elevators.

Frictionless technology in the concourses will allow fans to get up to buy a beer or some ​​Hattie B’s Hot Chicken with ease - scan your card or phone on your way into the relevant outlet, pick up your refreshments and simply walk out - AI and sensors will track what you take so you don’t have to wait around in queues.

If it’s a particularly boring game, 360 degree exterior terraces will offer incredible panoramic views of the city.

“Most times, upper concourses in NFL venues aren’t that special, right? They’re the furthest away, the highest seats and oftentimes they don’t have as much area per person based on how the building stacks up and how we’re trying to control costs", said Robinson.

"But in this building, you’ll be able to walk around the entire upper concourse and you’ll have glass walls with garage doors that open up to a beautiful terrace that overlooks the city in all directions.”

Above: This is how the new Nissan Stadium bowl is planned to look on gamedays. Courtesy of MANICA.

Above: New Nissan Stadium terraces will feature 360 degree views of the city. Courtesy of Tennessee Titans.

The gameday experience for players and fans is obviously crucial but in terms of revenue generation, modern stadiums have to be multi-purpose. For example, new Nissan will be home of the Titans but the season finishes in February - upkeep costs are a year round issue.

The roof means this stadium will be capable of hosting Final Fours, Wrestlemania, gigs and festivals every month while a 12,000 square feet community centre will offer a space for job fairs, charity dinners and education seminars.

The future is really exciting but what about the past?

Out with the old, in with the new (Nissan)

With no need for two stadiums right next to each other, Nissan Stadium will be demolished.

Most stadiums see their end through controlled implosion but given the old facility is only 90 feet from the new one, that isn’t an option as DeCoursey explains:

“We’re actually going to be using a mechanical crunching arm, one of the largest that we can source in the United States. I think it has a reach of about 135 feet so we’re going to mechanically bring down each side of the stadium."

"The east grandstand will start first - that’s closest to the new stadium - and then we’ll move to the west. It takes about three months to bring down each side of the stadium so we’ll be bringing down the structural concrete, precast concrete of the existing stadium structure, bringing it down to the ground and then crunching it further and rubblising it.”

The plan now is for new Nissan Stadium to do what its predecessor never could - host a Super Bowl - and if you’re going to spend $1.2 billion of the public’s money, you’d better build something pretty special.

New Nissan Stadium certainly looks the part with its exposed terraces and unique square footprint. The franchise is hoping to host the showcase game in 2029 or 2030 and the stars are aligning for that to happen.

As for the team, it’s fair to say there’s work to do before the Titans find themselves in the NFL’s biggest game again. But never say never.

After all, the last time the franchise opened a new stadium, they came up just one yard short of the coveted crown.

An exciting new era is dawning in Nashville and at its heart is a stadium ready to host America’s greatest showcase.

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Additional footage and images courtesy of Tennessee Titans, MANICA, NBC, KSHB 41, FOX, Sports, ElectricTV, Cal OES, Jonnathan Rodríguez aka JROD, WSMV 4 Nashville, Diego Serrano, chowitt101, up2datecountry.live, Jerry Sherk, ABC News, Kan Do It, Mitchell Tenpenny, Wrestlemania and Douglas Bergere.

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