BRIAN NARRATION: For over 2 millennia, stadiums have served as vital hubs where people gather to witness the prowess of athletes and performers. These arenas embody a sense of community, where people from all ages, class, race, and gender come together ….and still sometimes pick sides…

Vox Pop: um, make sure I'm right there, in front of the team so I could see everything that's going on. Trash talk to other teams, whoever we're playing. 

BRIAN NARRATION: Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia is home to the NFL's Atlanta Falcons and Major League Soccer’s Atlanta United, and it’s the first professional sports venue in North America to be LEED Platinum and the first stadium worldwide to be TRUE Platinum–certified.  But keeping this space true to its green ethos requires more than corporate intentions.

BRIAN NARRATION: I’m Brian Maughan, Chief Innovation and Marketing Officer with Fidelity National Financial, and this is Built – The podcast where you’ll meet creative leaders in the commercial real estate industry and hear how they do what they do.

In our fifth season of BUILT, we’re taking a closer look at the places where we gather. In this episode, join us at one of the busiest and greenest multi-purpose stadiums in North America.

BRIAN NARRATION: Mercedes-Benz Stadium is located at the heart of Atlanta, and it’s easy to get to, no matter how you travel. You can get there using MARTA, the city’s public transportation system, between Vine City and CNN Center stations in Downtown.  

It spans 2 million square feet, and stands 30 stories tall. From the outside, the building is all angular shapes in a mix of glass and metal, creating a sleek and dynamic appearance, accentuated by LED lighting at night.

It also includes the HomeDepot Backyard, an 11 acre green space adjacent to the stadium used for tailgating and community activities like movie nights and free fitness events.

Mercedes-Benz Stadium is definitely a place that brings people together, making it a big financial engine for the city of Atlanta and moving millions of fans through downtown. 

It took years of planning, design and construction. 

DIETMAR: So it was very important for Arthur Blank right from the get go to design a stadium that is sustainable.

BRIAN NARRATION: The stadium was the idea of American businessman Arthur M. Blank. He is one of the co-founders of the home improvement retailer The Home Depot, and the owner of the Atlanta Falcons and the Atlanta United! You are listening to Dietmar Exler, Chief Operating Officer from AMBSE, the parent company to the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons, MLS’s Atlanta United and Mercedes-Benz Stadium.

DIETMAR: It was pretty clear for him from the beginning, he wanted to achieve platinum certification for stadium build.

BRIAN NARRATION: Before we tell you about what makes this structure one of the greenest entertainment venues on the continent, we need to go back in time, because before 2014 this area looked very different.

DAWN: The Westside of Atlanta was made up of a couple of different pieces, originally part of this land. 

BRIAN NARRATION: Dawn Brown is the Senior Manager for Stadium Tours, Education Programs and Sustainability.

DAWN: There was the Georgia Dome where the Falcons used to play and then we had some parking lots, some surface areas, a couple of worship spaces. 

BRIAN NARRATION: Fans like Alexandria, who was born and raised in Atlanta, have memories of concerts and Falcons games at the old 1992 Georgia Dome that sat here. She remembers when the area also had houses and churches.

Vox Pop: So it was a bit of controversy when they first, you know, built the stadium. But, um, I think it is generating a lot of, um, economic growth for the community, for the city.

So, I guess it's plus side for it. Alright, good. 

BILL: To get something like that done is a comprehensive all in team effort, and we worked hand in hand with the Falcons on everything. 

BRIAN NARRATION: Bill Darden grew up in East Point, a suburb of Atlanta. And through his firm, Darden and Company, he was the project manager for the Mercedes-Benz Stadium construction.

BILL: I'm trying to think of it, something that we didn't oversee. And maybe it'd be easier that way. We didn't oversee the financial or legal component, but every other thing, how to get it built, what it took to manage both the design and the construction process was our responsibility.

BRIAN NARRATION: From the moment Arthur Blank bought the Falcons in 2002 -with a price tag of $545 million-, he was thinking about replacing their old stadium. 

Bill’s team briefly looked at a Georgia Dome renovation but it quickly became apparent that building new was a better choice. 

When big structures are built, they have a direct impact on the landscape around them. And when they age, they become technologically obsolete. And in the case of the old Georgia Dome, with a Teflon-coated fiberglass fabric roof stretching almost 400,000 feet, not all impact was good.

BILL: So what would happen is when they'd have a massive rain, all that rainwater would just pour into the local streets and neighborhoods surrounding it. 

BRIAN NARRATION: By this time, Bill had done 2 dozen projects for Arthur Blank. He says the creation of the Mercedes-Benz stadium can be broken down into a few components. 

BILL: The first two years was Politics and entitlements and test fitting, where do you put the building. We originally were going to put it on one site and the mayor of Atlanta at the time said, “Hey, could you put the stadium between two MARTA stations?” When I did that the first time with our architectural group to test fit to see if that would work, you could definitely not do it. You can only put about half the stadium on it.

BRIAN NARRATION: So placing the stadium on the site where it stands today, required support from the local community.

BILL: We had to work very diligently and very compassionately with two historical Black churches and some other businesses that were willing to relocate and were compensated for that. 

BRIAN NARRATION: And required support from the local and state governments because they provided some funding. Today the stadium sits on State land.

BILL: Arthur doesn't own the stadium, if you're a taxpayer in the state of Georgia, you own a piece of the stadium.

BRIAN NARRATION: After making space for the new structure, it was time for design and construction. They interviewed a handful of massive architectural firms with NFL or major league building experience. 

BILL: The performances were outstanding by everybody. And this one group came in and they went out and basically built a full size model, they actually had a button on the side and they let Mr. Blank go over and press it and the roof actually opened up on the model. 

BRIAN NARRATION: That architecture team was 360 Architects out of Kansas City, and while working on this project, they were acquired by HOK, one of the leading architectural firms in the world.

BILL: After that interview, I remember everybody just going, “Holy mackerel,” everybody's got chills up their spine. The design changed to some degree, just details, but essentially what they did in that model and what they showed is pretty much what's sitting there. 

BRIAN NARRATION: In the early stages of this project, planners and architects visited other stadiums for inspiration.

DIETMAR: I always thought the NFL teams are competing incredibly hard against each other. That is true for on field play. The stadiums itself are working incredibly well together.

BRIAN NARRATION: COO, Dietmar Exler again.

DIETMAR: If we wanted to know what another stadium is doing for a certain area, just call them, and they are absolutely willing and happy to share what they are doing, what works and doesn't work.

BRIAN NARRATION: The original budget for this project was 1 Billion Dollars, but once the first cost estimates started to come in it became apparent that this was not gonna be just a billion dollars project. Although significant public funds helped finance the stadium, it wasn't nearly enough to fully cover construction, so Arthur had a choice to make. 

BILL: And to the state of Georgia, Atlanta Falcons, Atlanta United, City of Atlanta, everybody, to their benefit, he decided, “I'll take the overruns over the amount of money that they put in,” and that was a huge, huge risk he took and a huge responsibility. 

BRIAN NARRATION: Soon after, a joint venture between the construction companies Holder, Hunt, Russell, and Moody became the contractor with Holder as the lead contractor. Ground was broken on  May 19, 2014, and the stadium was slated to open in March of 2017. But in a project of this magnitude, things were not easy.

BILL: I would say once a week, sometimes once a day, it felt like someone would come to me and go, “we're not going to make it.” You know, what are some of the challenging moments? my goodness, when we did the interview, the structural engineer, someone asked her, ”well, how many tons of steel?” and her number was some like 10-12,000 tons of steel.

There's close to 30,000 tons of steel in the actual building today. Now there's misses and there's misses, and that was a miss. When you miss structural steel of that nature you're talking several hundred million dollars in that one area. And you say, “well, if you just write a check, that'll solve it all.”

That's not true either. We were going to have two manufacturers of the steel for this building. We ended up having to go to 36 manufacturers of steel because it was so overwhelming with the amount of work it took. We couldn't even dent it with two. And then you sit there and think, “what if these people don't get the dimensions right?”. Coming from all these 36 different fabricators and whatnot, what if it shows up and doesn't fit? And to my eternal amazement, it did. 

BRIAN NARRATION: 27,500 tons of structural steel were used in the stadium. That's about 3 U.S. Navy destroyers at full load! 

Much of that steel is visible today. And even the majestic Falcon sculpture that adorns the entrance is made up of it. 

BRIAN NARRATION: In November 2023, we toured Mercedes-Benz stadium with Dawn Brown as our guide. We started in a place football fans don’t see.

BRIAN: We're like in the, in the bowels of the stadium.

DAWN: Yes, the belly of the beast where all of the action is, is really happening where the work is done to make those amazing events happen. So we have about 250 people that are here on a daily basis.

Cues: [Walking sounds]

BRIAN NARRATION: Dawn took us on a walk and like fans entering through the main gates, we arrived at an open space overlooking the field. 

MBS Tour – Dawn: You get a full view of end zone to end zone with all the seating bowl completely exposed, almost a 80% of the Halo board viewing from here. So you can see everything that's going on. 

BRIAN NARRATION: We'll get to that halo later.

MBS Tour – Dawn: And then our Oculus, our operable roof that's up above. 

BRIAN NARRATION: One of the most recognizable features of Mercedes Benz Stadium is its roof.  Other stadiums have retractable roofs, but this one is unique. Eight gigantic panels rotate outward or inward from the center.

BILL: looks like eight pizza slices coming together. 

BRIAN NARRATION: Bill Darden again

BILL: Each one of those pizza slices weighs 500 tons. So think about that, getting eight pizza slices to meet right in the middle and touch perfectly. I just, that doesn't even, it doesn't even hardly make sense and I've already built it and it still doesn't make sense to me.

BRIAN NARRATION: Building that one-of-a-kind roof had challenges as well.

BILL: I will tell you the press was not very kind. They kept printing that the roof was broken and it didn't work. That was not at all true. That mechanical marvel worked from day one.

The only reason we had to rebuild it after we opened it a couple of times, it was too heavy. And so we had to take it back apart and put basically just -I'm oversimplifying it- we had to put bigger wheels to take the load of the extra weight.

BRIAN NARRATION: The roof opens from the center as each of those pizza slices slides back. 

MBS Tour – Dawn: Takes about eight and a half minutes to open, we will wait until fans are in the building, and then we'll open it as big surprise and delight moment and there's fans filming all over in this overlook area. Really cool to watch. 

                        Cues: [Video: 3, 2, 1 ... Open the roof…]

DAWN: Just the assembly of those trusses that are up there that are holding up that Oculus, the operable roof was incredible. We had the largest crane in the whole world here for months and months. Um, putting each of those pieces together like Legos and drawing them up into the sky and assembling them by hand.  I mean, it's an engineering marvel and to watch it go into place was some of the best days I had on the job. It was very stressful and pretty intense. But, um, also really, really just cool to be a part of.

BILL: It took hard work by people, many of which I never even got to meet. And probably my only regret was I wasn't able to get around and shake every single, all 3000 people that somehow were under my care. I wish that I could have thanked all of 'em individually and told 'em how much I appreciated what they did, because I'd look up in the sky and I'd see men and women hanging off the side of a piece of steel or upside down, hanging in the middle of the air.

And I just thought, my goodness, what price could they possibly pay helping us get this stadium built? 

BRIAN NARRATION: It took 39 months and 1.5 Billion dollars to build Mercedes-Benz Stadium. 

BILL: And then as you might imagine, you know, if anybody listening has bought a house or built a home, you have a punch list. And so you can imagine the punch list on something that large. I want to say it was over half a million items, which is, just think about working through that.

BRIAN NARRATION: And remember the Georgia Dome?  It was used right next door until the new stadium was ready, so that the teams could play uninterrupted. Then, It was demolished in 2017 to make space for the 11 acre greenspace that's the HomeDepot Backyard today. 

BRIAN NARRATION: Dietmar Exler has been in charge of the operations in the stadium since 2019.

DIETMAR: As you can hear from my accent, I'm not a U. S. born person. I'm originally from Austria. 

I worked actually, before I worked here first at MBUSA, selling cars in New York, 

BRIAN NARRATION: Dietmar was President and CEO of Mercedes-Benz USA, the actual automotive brand.

DIETMAR: And we moved our headquarter to Atlanta. Great city, great environment, and we built a relationship right after with Arthur Blank, who built at that time the new stadium and Mercedes became the name sponsor.

BRIAN NARRATION: A few years after that, Mercedes offered Dietmar to move overseas but with family and roots in the States he decided to stay and join Arthur Blank's organization.

DIETMAR: And move from selling metal, cars, to selling hot dogs in the stadium.

BRIAN NARRATION: And selling hot dogs they have. Even before artists performed and games were played here ….

In August 2017, a few days before its official opening, the Stadium welcomed its first visitors for free.

BILL: we opened it up and let the public come in and just walk through. 

BRIAN NARRATION: Project Manager Bill Darden again. 

BILL: I took my family with me and a lot of people came to do it.  And it didn't hit me. Until I just walked inside the front door, I noticed that people kept bumping into each other and that's because when they walked in, they just stopped and looked and just big smiles on their face and pointing at all this stuff.

BILL: And I will tell you, that was an emotional moment for me. It, it just did not, hadn't registered with me how happy something I had worked on was going to make so many people over the next so many years. And it did. 

Cues: Act II: Sustainability and the community 

BRIAN NARRATION: Mercedes-Benz Stadium officially opened with a pre-season game of the Atlanta Falcons vs the Arizona Cardinals on August 26, 2017. And sustainability was built in. Just a few months after opening, it became the first professional sports stadium in the United States to achieve LEED Platinum Certification. The highest level on this rating system that recognizes building green. 

DAWN: a lot of the times when you're along the sustainability journeys, you don't see the grind that happens, and the certification just validates all of that work. 

BRIAN NARRATION: Besides being the senior manager for stadium tours and education programs, Dawn Brown oversees the sustainability initiatives here. 

DAWN: With LEED Platinum Certification, it was how we built the building and the systems that we put in place to offset our environmental footprint.

Cues: [Tour sounds]

BRIAN NARRATION: During our tour, back at the overlook, Dawn pointed to the ticket canopy, just outside the main gate.

MBS Tour – Dawn: Right up above them is solar panels. When you think about designing sustainably, most of the elements you'd like to include in green building is multipurpose items. And so our solar panels are the ticketing canopy. Um, They're also advertisement. There's panels and banners on the outside, and t hen we have a parking lot that also has solar canopy. So, in total on our campus, we have 4,000 solar panels, um, that equate to 1.6 million kilowatts annually that we're creating renewable energy.

BRIAN NARRATION: Mercedes-Benz Stadium uses other innovative design features -like a special insulation material that covers the facade allowing natural light in-. All together they reduce the building's electrical use by 29%

And the stadium was designed with a water reclamation system that helps alleviate rain flooding in the Westside neighborhood. 

DAWN: It was one of the first things built on the project. So we had to dig down about five stories deep, create a 1.1 million gallon water retention vault that's tied into the stormwater around the building, helps capture that surface water.

And then once we built the building, there's a 14 acre roof, it obviously got rain coming down onto it. How do we capture that and make sure it's used?. And we were able to do that with almost a 2 million gallon capturing system between those two areas.

We're using that for cooling tower make-up water. We're using it for irrigation, and that in and of itself, thinking about the struggles we have as a city as it pertains to water was a huge piece of this project. Um, we got 55 out of the 50 allotted points on the LEED Platinum certification for water. So that's the big… 

BRIAN: That’s pretty big!

DAWN: Yeah, that's the big element.

BRIAN NARRATION: And fans have noticed. Here’s Harish Patel, a season-ticket holder we met before a game.  And his favorite thing about the stadium might surprise you!

Vox Pop: The bathrooms. So they got the, uh, waterless urinals. A lot of water they're saving. That's good. I'm a contractor, so I know, very good engineering, very interesting.

DAWN: Sustainability is a part of everything we do. So it doesn't end there. When you open and operate a building, you can't just check a box and be like, “we're LEED Platinum certified. All right, the work is done.” 

DIETMAR: The next goal we set ourselves was zero waste.

BRIAN NARRATION: COO Dietmar Exler again

DIETMAR: Zero waste means less than 10 percent of all the waste that is generated in the stadium, and this year there's going to be in total about four and a half million pounds, less than 10 percent of that can go to landfill.

Everything else needs to be either composted or recycled. 

MBS Tour – Brian: Alright, where to next? 

MBS Tour – Dawn: Yeah, we're gonna go to our resource recovery room next. That's really where all the magic is. 

BRIAN NARRATION: We arrive at a 6,000 square foot space intentionally built as part of their LEED Certification process. This is where all the recycling and composting happened in their journey to Zero waste.

MBS Tour – Dawn: When you look at the materials coming in, we have to identify what do we have, how do we divert it from landfill, what do we need to go upstream and get out of the building.

Um, different styrofoams, different plastics, different things like that. So at the end of every day, our resource recovery team is down here individually opening up a bag, sorting through all of that waste.

What we've done is educate our fans, our associates, back of house to do the right thing as much as possible. We set them up with the right bins. We teach them, we do trainings; we’ve incorporated it in everything. Then at the end of the day, hopefully the behaviors upstream have really helped impact our sorters down here, which has happened.

DIETMAR: You know, the biggest surprise here for me was, we thought, how do we communicate that to the fans? 

BRIAN: Right!

DIETMAR: How do we get them to participate? And we made it really simple. We have a green waste bin and a blue waste bin. And the blue is basically for the bottles. And the green is for everything else that's compostable. It was easy. The fans were immediately on board and supported us way beyond our expectation. 

BRIAN NARRATION: So, in late 2022, Mercedes-Benz Stadium became the first professional sports stadium in the world to achieve Total Resource Use and Efficiency or TRUE Platinum Certification for its zero waste efforts. Among them, the management of hard to recycle materials like Aluminum.

Dawn says 3 million cans equals a home for Habitat for Humanity.

MBS Tour – Dawn: And we have built four homes since opening up our stadium. So over 12 million cans. 

BRIAN NARRATION: And keeping track of impact is a big job in itself…

DAWN: We developed a green team that would help divide up some of that work and that tracking and metrics and, we have to educate the fans. We have to educate the associates. We have to put bins in place. And there's people behind those processes.

And so we wanted to make sure that we created a collective approach. 

BRIAN NARRATION: And with it, the Green Team created a Zero Waste playbook documenting policies and processes. And they share their approach with other interested stadiums as well as other teams, leagues, and industries.

DAWN: We laid all that out. We've done webinars, one on one interactions with teams throughout the U.S. and showed them the pathway that we took to get to zero waste. 

BRIAN NARRATION: Since our visit, the resource recovery room has moved off site to a separate location nearby that provides a lot more space for sorting.

[Urban garden sounds]

MBS Tour – Dawn: Okay, so, this is my baby. This is where I would be all day, every day if allowed. 

BRIAN NARRATION: Mercedes-Benz Stadium has an on-site urban garden just outside the building as part of its LEED Platinum design. Dawn was instrumental in that process even before the stadium was built. 

DAWN: When I was a part of Holder Construction, and we had the office trailers across the street, I put garden beds in those.

And we put cisterns on the side of the office trailers to recycle rainwater. That was a partnership with Trees Atlanta as we were building the building, which at the time my husband worked for. It was more of a, um, marital, I was trying to help him solve for a problem he had at work and he was helping me like do this really cool thing.

It was one of those pillow talk moments turned into this really fun collaboration. 

BRIAN NARRATION: So when the stadium was ready, an area was dedicated for the urban garden.

MBS Tour – Dawn: We have about a quarter of an acre here, um, lined with fig trees, muscadines, apple trees, blueberries, persimmons, blackberries, um, all in ground. And then we have nine raised beds that we're changing over seasonally.

BRIAN NARRATION:  The garden uses some of the composted materials generated from the stadium’s trash and is irrigated with water captured in the Stormwater Management System. There's fruits, veggies, and they even grow produce for partnerships.

MBS Tour – Dawn: We did a pepper beer Sweetwater earlier this year. And we're going to be doing a pepper hibiscus lavender beer

BRIAN NARRATION: And they are even making muscadine wine...

MBS Tour – Dawn: last year we had about... 37 bottles of wine. This year, we're looking at about 80. 

MBS Tour St - BRIAN: Who takes care of it? Who's the actual gardener? 

MBS Tour – Dawn: That's me. It's you. Yes. Farmer Dawn. Farmer Dawn. That is me. Yes. So, I say that, but we have an incredible garden club. Um, We have associates and students come out here and do garden days. Things are thriving out here in the garden.

Um, And then you'll see it's also lined with beautiful pollinating plants, flowers, things to help add to habitat. 

BRIAN NARRATION: Their goal is to draw birds, butterflies, and they have 3 beehives.

MBS Tour – Dawn: Our first hive is... Atlanta Falcons, then we have a Mercedes Benz hive, and then our Atlanta United Hive, and about 30,000 bees. 

These bees can fly up to 2 miles, so they're pollinating all these other community gardens and there’s 11 within two miles of the stadium. So hopefully they're going out, collect all their nectar, coming back, and creating this amazing honey. We got 94 pounds of honey out of our beehives this year, so, really, really proud of them. They're doing, they're doing the good work.

BRIAN NARRATION: But of course bees are not the only hard workers around here. 

MBS Tour – Dawn: The original beds were built by West Side Works Construction Ready Program, which is a program that's through our foundation that helps get West Side residents to a living wage earning job. Construction Ready is one of those programs. So they help to build our garden beds. 

BRIAN NARRATION: Members of that program also worked in the construction of the stadium, and there are many other initiatives geared to involve the community.

DIETMAR: I think the secret is do a lot of different things. Then you can reach a lot of people in different ways. 

BRIAN NARRATION: Chief Operating Officer, Dietmar Exler

DIETMAR: We're doing Westside Ambassadors. We are offering to a lot of young kids to work actually at the stadium in guest services. We have a special programs where we enroll members of the West Side in, say, a culinary arts class, free of charge for them. 10 weeks, every day, and you learn to be a chef. And they prepare a gala dinner for their friends and family in the end. We pay for everything.

BRIAN NARRATION: And they use ingredients from the garden!

DIETMAR: If you're a chef today, You have no problems finding a job. Or when we have events in the Home Depot backyard, We reach out and invite all of our friends from the West side to enjoy them as well. We do specific events like night markets or fitness classes that are all free of charge just to reach out, be a good neighbor, and participation seems to suggest we're on the right track here. 

BRIAN: Oh, I love it. 

Cue: Visit Tape - Follow Mr…

BRIAN NARRATION: Part of being a good neighbor is also getting children into the stadium through school field trips.

            Cue: Visit Tape - Hi Guys…

DAWN: To watch second graders walk through the building and see where their favorite player plays, but also learning about what it means to be a good steward of water.

DAWN: How you can... affect your community by doing that, capturing rainwater, being mindful of how you create landscaping around a building, can prevent climate issues from happening, flooding from happening. Things that we get to show the example of, students are learning about, then they're hopefully taking that back to their places of worship, their schools, their community centers.  

Cues: Act III: Fan Experience / Tech / The Future

BRIAN NARRATION: Now that you’ve seen how sustainability is baked into everything they do here, we’re heading back to the sports – and what it’s like to be a fan here.  

DIETMAR: Probably the secret is, who are we really competing with as Mercedes Benz Stadium? How many Atlanta Falcons fans do you think on a Sunday morning debate whether they should fly to Kansas City or stay here in Atlanta and see the Falcons or go to New York or to Dallas? We're not really competing with the other stadiums.

What we're all competing with is the living room couch.

BRIAN NARRATION: Today, this is one of the busiest stadiums in North America, hosting about 10 Falcons games, 20 United soccer games, many international soccer matches...

DIETMAR: A lot of college football games, 10 concerts a year, more than 50 big ticketed item events a year.

BRIAN NARRATION: Dietmar Exler says the stadium follows Arthur Blank’s legacy and focuses predominantly on customer experience.

DIETMAR: It's not about football, it's not about soccer, it's not about concert, same thing what he started with Home Depot, focus on the customer is here focus on the fan. That's our credo, what can we do to give the fans a good time.

Cues: [Loud sounds of people cheering at the stadium entrance]

BRIAN NARRATION: When we visited the stadium before a game of the Falcons vs. the New Orleans' Saints, fans were enjoying themselves

Vox Pop - Alexandria: I love the spacing. The seats are huge. Like the restaurant options are good as well. So I love the stadium.

BRIAN NARRATION: That was Alexandria, who was waiting for the doors to open.

            Vox Pop - Jared: My dad's been a season ticket holder for as long as I've been born. And yeah, we've been coming out here ever since.

BRIAN NARRATION: Jared Morgan grew up a Falcons fan and has been with the team through ups and downs, and now he's a fan of the stadium too.

Vox Pop - Jared: It's great. It's a bigger upgrade from what the Dome was. I remember it taking a long time. But, but yeah, I'm, I'm definitely glad for the last five years we've had it. I mean, this is this is the heart and soul of what Atlanta is. This is the perfect place to have a stadium like this. And you know, the atmosphere is always fantastic. 

Vox Pop - Neil: I definitely like the new stadium, especially with the Home Depot backyard. I think it's definitely a centerpiece within the community. Um, and I think it's a staple and it's just iconic to Atlanta and everything it represents.

BRIAN NARRATION: Neil Brown also used to support the team at their old home. Here at Mercedes-Benz Stadium he likes to get his tickets on the lower level.

Vox Pop - Neil: That's definitely my favorite. I definitely say lower level walking around and going to all the vendors is also my second favorite thing to do and to eat is my third favorite 

BRIAN NARRATION: There's a wide variety of food and beverage options accessible at the concession stands operated by local restaurants in the stadium. And the prices surprised us!

DIETMAR: There's a dozen items in the stadium that kind of like are price controlled, so bottomless Coke is $2, a hamburger is $4. 

BRIAN NARRATION: Cheeseburgers $5, chicken tenders and fries $6. 

DIETMAR: So you can more or less feed a family for 20 to 25, if you had alcoholic drinks for the adults, maybe $30.

BRIAN NARRATION: The idea of affordable foods came from Arthur himself. Project Manager Bill Darden remembers the reasons behind the strategy.

BILL: There was zero chance of swaying him on this and nobody really tried and it goes back to his own personal experience. He said “before I hit it big with Home Depot, I tried and take my family to a Braves game or something back in the day or Falcons.”

He said, “you know, we had to stop at the varsity or something like that and eat because I couldn't afford to feed them at the stadium.” 

BRIAN NARRATION: It's also a response to feedback that came from market research the Falcons conducted before opening the stadium. Fans thought that food prices at the old Georgia Dome were too high.

And it turns out, the strategy was smart from a business perspective. Forbes reported that as of August 2023, 1,364,761 hot dogs were sold at the Mercedes-Benz stadium, making the money back in volume.

MBS Tour – Dawn: The fan experience is a huge part of what we do. Um, we open up the gates an hour and a half ahead of time. Fans are lined up at the gate. They're ready to come in. They want to eat the food. They want to see the sites, they want to come take a picture by the Big Falcon statue that we're standing next to. All of that is part of the experience of coming here. 

BRIAN NARRATION: And coming in can be a lot less stressful here, with a security screening system that doesn't require you to take your phone or keys out of your pocket when you enter. 

DIETMAR: We're adding the next level to that. That's a facial recognition and opt in system. Nobody's forced to do that, but a lot of our season ticket members signed up. Brian, if you come to the stadium, there's an iPad in front of you. You're a couple of steps away, it already recognizes you. Our agent, on the other side, has your name. And we'd say, “hello, Brian, thank you for coming to Mercedes Benz Stadium. There are three tickets in your account next to yours. Are these three your guests?” You say “yes.” “Welcome to the stadium.” And that's it, and you're in.

Cues: [Tour Sounds]

MBS Tour – Dawn: Hi, guys! Hey, how are you? Good. This is your 50 yard line view.

BRIAN NARRATION: Back on the tour, Dawn took us to Arthur Blank's suite, which has the best seats in the house. The view is fantastic, and right now, the field engineering team is preparing the field for a Sunday football game. Dawn says by Tuesday they'll flip the field for a soccer match. 

MBS Tour – Dawn: What that means is that all the paint is water soluble. They'll scrub all of the paint, reline it, repaint it, take those retractables out of all four corners, um, take the football goals down, put the soccer goals up, and completely transition this into a soccer feeling space.

BRIAN NARRATION: It's a transition that takes 6 to 9 hours.

MBS Tour – Dawn: It's a lot easier to go from football to soccer than it is soccer to football. There's just more lines to put out there, more logos and numbers and things like that to add. 

BRIAN NARRATION: During concerts, the field gets completely covered, a stage is built, and about 10,000 additional seats get placed on top of it. Music superstars like Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Elton John, The Rolling Stones, and even Willie Nelson have performed here.

And keeping with its innovative spirit, the stadium anticipates yet another change in the field, for a very good reason. 

DIETMAR: We are all tremendously excited about the FIFA World Cup in 26.

BRIAN NARRATION: Mercedes-Benz Stadium will host the semifinal!

BRIAN NARRATION: Chances are a few of the world cup matches will be played in the stadium.

DIETMAR: Just to tease you a little bit, we'll have some other international soccer competition to get ready for that up front. Announcements coming shortly. And for these games, we'll have 70,000 in the stadium and the vast majority is coming from all over the world which will be a tremendous exciting time for us.

BRIAN NARRATION: But the stadium is a dome, so even with the roof open there's not enough light for grass to grow in the field. So new grass from local farms will be installed and maintained with help from technology. Among other things they’ll use large growing lamps.

DIETMAR: We need to put underground irrigation and ventilation in.  We have Atlanta United play on grass games to make sure that we learn after a soccer game how do we get it in shape again.

Cues: [Footsteps]

BRIAN NARRATION: As we move through the stadium, it's clear that art has a spotlight here.

MBS Tour – Dawn: as we walk around, you'll see large scale pieces like the one that's above us. This one is really cool. It's a Melody Postma piece, um, and shows the evolution of our Falcons logo and also features photographs from our original Falcons game in Fulton County Stadium.

MBS Tour – Dawn: So as fans are walking around, they're not just seeing that typical brick and, you know, concession stand kind of feel. There's an artistic and beautiful design element as well. 

BRIAN NARRATION: There are almost 200 pieces of art in the building in every kind of medium, you can find sculptures, drawings, paintings, murals...even a football-shaped glass chandelier. 

Cues: [Tour sounds]

MBS Tour St - BRIAN: Alright, so we're walking and we're headed to... 

MBS Tour – Dawn: We are going to go to the field next. This is one of the big highlights.

BRIAN NARRATION: Dawn takes us through a long hallway that brings us to the field. And let me tell you, it's awe inspiring. And when you look up, surrounding the circumference of the roof there's a huge screen, that's the halo. 

MBS Tour – Dawn: First of its kind ever to be built is a circular scoreboard. And it is 1,100 linear square feet and 60 ft tall with 38.1 million LED bulbs in it.

BRIAN NARRATION: There's also vertical displays to engage with fans. 

MBS Tour – Dawn: This is more of a what's going on in the game sponsor, replay, fun fan photos, all that engagement with the crowd.

Cues: [Crowd chanting at the stadium: “Fans chanting”]

BRIAN NARRATION: This is the home of the Atlanta Falcons and Atlanta United, so that crowd can be pretty wild.

Cues: [Crowd chanting at the stadium: “Atlanta…United”]

DIETMAR: Seeing the passionate fans that are just having a good time is awesome. And the Falcons with the Dirty Birds, which is a section you don't sit down the whole game. It's cheering, it's fun, it's loud. 

Cues: [Crowd chanting at the stadium: “Atlanta…Falcons!!”]

DIETMAR: It's flags waving... I enjoyed it so much because I feel that's really our mission as a stadium. Bringing people together, have them forget whatever else is going on. And give them a good time.

BRIAN NARRATION: Bill Darden is retired now, and says he keeps great memories from this project.

BILL: I think the biggest is just the people. The people on one half of the coin that get to enjoy the building, the fact that they have a place that they can come and they can smile and go, wow, and just be blown away by, I think that's, that is half of it.

And the other half are the wonderful people that I got to work with over the course of eight years. That's a special, fraternity slash sorority, of people that I will never forget. I'll always be grateful to, hold in great reverence to their abilities and how much effort they put into it.

DAWN:  What we get to do here is change the mindset that sports and entertainment are just what happens on the field and on the pitch. It's more than that.

BRIAN NARRATION: If you want to check photos of Mercedes-Benz Stadium visit us at builtpodcast.com

Built is a co-production of Fidelity National Financial and PRX Productions. From FNF, our project is run by Annie Bardelas. This episode was produced by Sandra Lopez-Monsalve and edited by Genevieve Sponsler. Production support by Emmanuel Desarme. Audio mastering by Rebecca Seidel. Our location producer is Claire Reynolds. The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

Special thanks to our guests, and to Emilie Leveille, Heather Sautter, Alexandria, Harish Patel, Jared Morgan, Neil Brown and everyone else who spoke to us in Atlanta.

I’m Brian Maughan.

Thanks for listening and remember, every story is unique, every property is individual, but we’re all part of this BUILT world.