Today's episode looks at the Buffalo Bills' new stadium set to open in 2026. I break down the innovative technology being used to make the outdoor stadium feel like an indoor stadium, including a unique canopy structure with the world's largest snow melt system, a state-of-the-art field heating apparatus, wind reduction panels that help keep the stadium warm, and much more. Enjoy!
The Joe Pomp Show
The Insane Technology of the Buffalo Bills' New Stadium
What's up everyone, I'm Joe Popliano and this is the Joe Pomp Show. I hope everyone's having a great week so far and gearing up for the new year with 2025 right around the corner. Today's podcast is a unique one because we're going to be breaking down how the Buffalo Bills are utilizing technology and creative engineering to make an outdoor stadium feel like a dome. We're going to talk about a variety of things like snow melt systems, heated fields, and even the degree that the seats are inclined at to make fans feel closer to the field. I think you guys are really going to enjoy this podcast because it's going to give you an inside look into how the Buffalo Bills are shaking things up in the world of sports architecture. Without further ado, let's get right into it. Sports stadiums were once an afterthought for sports fans. As long as there were seats, hot dogs, and beer, fans were happy. Stadiums have met these basic needs for decades and were nothing more than concrete slabs with a field and a few scoreboards. But fast forward to the modern sports age and stadium projects have become complex architectural wonders that look like a Dave and Buster's on steroids, complete with countless luxury suites, crazy concession items, and kid zones that resemble amusement parks. And some of today's TVMs even have pools and nightclubs because why watch sports from a plastic seat when you can do it in a body of water with champagne bottle service? Now, you may think there's no good reason for a stadium to have all these bells and whistles, but sports teams are leveling up the ridiculousness of their stadium experiences for one all-to-obvious reason. Money. Sports franchises are now trying to maximize real estate-related revenue to protect themselves from the eventual death of cable television and the decline in TV revenue. Sure, teams are currently enjoying the fruits of multi-billion dollar cable contracts, but in the new era of streaming, those massive TV paychecks may no longer be a guaranteed revenue stream in the coming decades. This is why teams are investing in massive real estate developments tied to their stadiums. New Age Stadium projects now include surrounding land packed with bars, restaurants, hotels, residential buildings, and offices that drive even more revenue to the teams and they can keep all of this money for themselves. The Braves have the Battery in Atlanta. The Bucks have the Deer District in Milwaukee. The Cardinals have ballpark village in St. Louis. These team-owned venues have become cash-printing machines. Take SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, for instance. The $5.5 billion behemoth, which is owned by Rams understand Cronkey, made around $20 million from Taylor Swift's era's tour. This is why many people were surprised when the Buffalo Bills released renderings for their new stadium. Located directly across the street from the team's current stadium, the NFL's northern most team chose an open-air stadium rather than a dome. Now this is controversial because taxpayers are covering $850 million of the $2 billion construction costs. That was the most public money ever committed to building an NFL stadium until the Tennessee Titans blew past the Buffalo Bills in April, when they received $1.2 billion in state and local funding for their new stadium in Nashville. You can argue that Erie County's $250 million contribution is worth it because keeping an NFL team in Buffalo is financially beneficial to local businesses. However, the state of New York is also contributing $600 million to the project, even though 99% of New York residents will never visit the venue or see any financial benefit from its construction. And since it will be an outdoor venue, taxpayers won't even have access to other premium events during the winter, like the Super Bowl, Final Four, or concerts. Bills fans will tell you this is all part of the Bills Moffee experience. Team owner Terry Bugula has even explicitly said that football is meant to be played outdoors. But platitudes aside, it's no secret that Buffalo gets a lot of snow during the winter. The Bills' current stadium doesn't have a heated field, like Lambo Field in Green Bay or Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, and the team routinely pays fans $20 an hour to shovel snow out of the stadium before home games. So rather than just building a carbon copy of the team's current stadium across the street, the Bills have worked with some of the world's best stadium engineers to creatively design a stadium that mimics an indoor venue while still being outdoors. The Buffalo Bills hired Populist as its architectural design firm for the team's new stadium. Populist is a name you might have come across in the past because they build many of the world's largest and nicest sports venues, including Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London, Kyle Field at Texas A&N, and Yankee Stadium in New York City. Buffalo's new stadium will be in the parking lot across the street from its current stadium. Once construction is completed, the Bills will demolse the team's current stadium and convert its land into a parking lot for the new venue. The new stadium will have the same name as the old one, Highmark Stadium. There will be around 10,000 fewer seats in the current stadium, fans can access a wide range of tickets from luxury suites to standing remotely and watch party options. While that might sound like every other new multi-billion dollar NFL venue built over the last decade, the Bills' new stadium will also have a few unique attributes. For starters, the new Highmark Stadium includes a canopy. This canopy will cover 64% of the seats to protect fans from rain and snow. The seats will sit at a 34 degree angle close to the maximum incline allowed by law and up from the 28 degree angle in the old stadium. This will bring fans in the top row, 54 feet closer to the field. The Bills are also placing stadium speakers right underneath this canopy. Stadium architects have started to employ this strategy design more often because, when combined with the incline seats, all seat and noise bounces off the canopy and returns down to the field, artificially inflating crowd noise throughout the venue. We see this effect at Lumen Field in Seattle, which uses a similar design to create one of the loudest stadiums in the NFL, and a massive home field advantage for the Seahawks. The Buffalo Bills' new canopy doesn't just protect fans from rain and increased sound. The canopy will include the world's largest snow melt system. Designed in the shape of a V, the canopy has built-in sensors that can detect moisture. The canopy will then use heaters to melt the snow, transporting it outside the stadium through an intricate system of pipes. The playing field will consist of natural grass instead of artificial turf, and unlike the team's current stadium, it will have a heating unit underneath it. Like the packer setup in Green Bay or the chief setup in Kansas City, the Bills will now be able to wirelessly control the temperature of the field, allowing them to heat the field during the snowy winter months so players don't feel like they will be being tackled on concrete. The Bills are also putting a giant subair system underneath the field. This is the same system that a gust in national golf club has beneath all of its greens and even its walkways after a patron slipped and fell at the masters. Subair systems are great because they help you control the condition of the playing field, using it vacuuming the suck-up moisture when it's too wet or pushing air into the grass to help with aeration. And the best part? When you combine that subair system with a set of UV-grown lights, the Bills will now be able to grow near-perfect grass year-round regardless of the weather. The stadium's exterior will be fitted with thousands of steel panels. Yes, these panels look cool, but more importantly, they help prevent wind from entering the stadium. The stadium's unique design will push wind over it, helping keep fans warm whether they are traveling through the covered congors or sitting in their seats. Players will be happy too, rather than keeping all the best tech in a nearby practice facility and only adding a bare-bone setup to the game-day stadium. The Bills' new venue will have state-of-the-art locker rooms, weight rooms, saw-n-us, steam rooms, medical rooms with x-ray machines, team dining facilities, and coaches' offices. Home and away teams currently use the same tunnel to access the field from the locker rooms, however, Buffalo's new stadium layout will have multiple tunnels. That means home and away teams will never interact on game day, and it also means that the Bills will never have to watch suggests through a cringy walkout with a giant boombox ever again. Since the new Highmark Stadium will have more tech builds into it than almost any other NFL venue, the Bills are adding an entirely separate building next door. This 18,000-square-foot technology building will sit directly south of the stadium, housing everything from the broadcast server room to the stadium's in-house Wi-Fi system. Now, many people will still complain that Buffalo didn't go with an indoor venue. The most common argument is that an outdoor venue prohibits Buffalo from hosting other premium events, like the Super Bowl, the college football playoff national championship, or the Golden Goose, the Taylor Swift Show. And since taxpayers are fronting nearly half the construction costs, that money should be put into a venue that could be used year-round from those same taxpayers. However, I think about it a little bit differently. We can argue for hours about whether the Bills should receive a single dollar of taxpayer money for the stadium. The Baguio family is worth billions already, and having 100% control of an asset subsidized with $850 million in taxpayer money will only boost the team's $4.2 billion valuation. Socialized costs, privatized profit, as my friend Andrew Brandt likes to say. But the reality is that Buffalo would have never received any of those premium events anyways. Buffalo is the NFL's second smallest city, with a population of just $275,000. The city doesn't have the infrastructure to get awarded any of those events, and at least Buffalo's ownership group decided to keep the team and the city's culture intact by switching things up. We've entered a world where all new sports venues look the same, indoor, giant screens, a plethora of luxury suites, but when is enough enough? We already have Sofia Stadium in Los Angeles, US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis is fantastic, and I think the Clippers will eventually win awards for their fan-first design at the new Intuit Dome. But there is also a place for the alternative. There is something special about the old urinal troughs in Pittsburgh or the suburban home surrounding Lambo Field in Green Bay. The Bills' new stadium might not have the same bells and whistles as some of the NFL's most expensive venues, but it doesn't need to. Bills mafia likes things just the way they are, and that culture is exactly what makes Buffalo's fan base so special. And by the time the new Highmark Stadium opens in 2026, I know Bills mafia will have their folding tables ready to celebrate.