Modern capitalism has been an object of considerable public debate over the past 10 years, and while I’m not particularly inclined to join our ongoing conversation about the historic merits or contemporary failings of Western markets, I will say this: we are building too many football stadiums with roofs.
Last week I was on my way home from a conference in downtown D.C., and when I was stopped at a red light I checked a text message from a friend who’d sent me a video rendering of the new Washington Commanders stadium that will be completed and open to the public in 2030. The $2.7 billion stadium, per this video, looks great.
It’s built in the image of D.C.’s old RFK Stadium, there are grassy and leafy pavilions, and there’s a giant, palatial-looking glass exterior at the main entry (all great stadium rendering fodder), and most importantly, all of this is happening within D.C. city limits. The new stadium will mean leaving behind what’s now known as Northwest Stadium in Landover, Maryland. Toward the end of the Daniel Snyder era, attending a game out there had become, honest-to-god, the worst fan experience I’ve ever encountered in the United States.
But sitting in traffic last week, I found myself seething when I got to the 21-second mark of the Commanders’ preview video. It happened again at the 26-second mark, the 28-second mark, the 38-second mark, and the 51-second mark: why in the WORLD does that stadium need a roof?
July and August humidity notwithstanding, D.C. has one of the more temperate climates of any major city in America, and even the humidity is manageable on most summer days. The Nationals play all 81 home games in an open-air stadium and it’s not a problem. A football stadium hosting games from September to (in theory) January will be completely fine hosting all of those games outdoors. That’s been true in the hulking, open-air disaster this team has had in Landover for the past 30 years, and it was certainly true at RFK from 1961 to 1996.
Alas, my hometown Commanders (née Football Team, née Redskins) are not the only franchise to go this direction. Step back, and it becomes clear we’ve got an epidemic on our hands.
A Lightweight Plastic Membrane Stretched Across Steel Cables
There are six other new stadiums currently in progress around the NFL. The $2.2 billion Titans stadium that’s opening in 2027 will come with a permanent roof. The Jaguars are spending $1.4 billion renovating their existing stadium and expect to have that project completed—with a new, translucent roof—in 2028. A new, $2.4 billion Browns stadium is slated for 2029, and from that point forward all Cleveland games will be played indoors. The Bears are still deciding where exactly their new stadium will be located when it opens in 2030, but wherever it is, it will be a fixed-roof project. The Broncos, on the other hand, have already secured a site for their new stadium and set a target date of 2031 for completing their new stadium, which will include a retractable roof. Finally, the $3 billion Chiefs stadium that’s also coming in 2031? You guessed it: Patrick Mahomes will finish his career under a roof.
Listen. I understand the argument for some stadiums with roofs, like in Minnesota, and I’m not opposed to all domes, everywhere. But this is getting out of hand. Earlier this decade we saw the arrival of Allegiant Stadium and SoFi Stadium in Las Vegas and Los Angeles—two cities with almost no inclement weather whatsoever—and both came with roofs.
Only the Carolina Panthers and Buffalo Bills have bravely zagged. While Carolina plays in an even more temperate climate than D.C. and has pledged to retain its open-air stadium after its renovation is completed in 2030, Buffalo’s new stadium opened this year and hosted its first regular season game last weekend. Highmark Stadium largely covers the stands for fans, but mercifully leaves the field open to the elements, maintaining January playoff football integrity. (I will not make the mistake of expressing optimism about this particular franchise, but if the Football Gods finally reward the Bills in 2027, we will all know why.)
As for everyone else, my objection to this trend is simple: one of the things that’s great about football is the wide variety of environments in which it’s played. The sport becomes something entirely different in a dome, on turf, or in 20 degree conditions when the ground is like a concrete. Likewise in the rain, as we saw last weekend in Chicago, or in the snow, like last year’s AFC title game in Denver. And that’s good! Variety makes the entire league richer and more layered as you flip from game to game. Bad weather can turn games into a grind, but there’s a charm to that too: we get to see how the best players in the world react to adversity and how offenses adapt to impossible constraints, to say nothing of the joys of watching 300-pound men trying to wrest control of a fumble in the midst of a downpour, or better yet a blizzard. If you’re lucky enough to attend one of these extreme weather games with friends or family, you’re generally bonded by the experience for life.
So how did we get to a point where all that charm is being sanded away? For one, stadium technology has improved. As one analyst observed to the Wall Street Journal this summer, “older domes from the 1960s and ’70s were essentially concrete roofs—opaque, dark, no natural light. Walking in felt like finding a football field in the middle of a parking garage.”
Today’s stadium roofs typically use a translucent material called ETFE—ethylene tetrafluoroethylene—which is a lightweight plastic membrane stretched across steel cables, and which allows for natural light to pass through to the stadium almost like a greenhouse, while the indoor conditions are climate-controlled just like any other dome. In other words, modern stadiums afford teams the benefits of an indoor stadium without the compromise of playing inside a parking garage and wrecking the natural aesthetics of a stadium.
In light of that technological progress and trade-offs that aren’t nearly as stark as they used to be, it now makes a lot of sense for owners who are spending several billion dollars on a stadium to optimize the returns of that event space on the 355 days they aren’t hosting professional football games. A roof allows ownership groups to build in the capacity to host concerts all year long, as well as conventions, NCAA Tournament games, or any number of other public events that may require a controlled weather environment. The roof also helps reduce ongoing capital costs around maintenance, wear and tear, etc.
The trend, then—by 2031 only 10 of 30 stadiums will be fully open to the elements—is perfectly rational. And that’s precisely the problem. The football environments that will emerge from this movement are ideal, predictable, and depressingly sterile.
From Ribeye to Filet Mignon
What the NFL should do, but won’t, is force teams to apply for dome exemptions and grant those exemptions only in special circumstances. Absent taking that step (or taking it five years ago), pro football is about to become a sport that’s primarily played indoors.
That shift won’t affect the league’s bottom line—nothing does—but should that really be the only consideration? There’s a culture that matters too. I don’t want to watch all 32 teams play on a pristine field, in pristine, climate-controlled conditions. I want Adam Vinatieri kicking game-winning field goals in a blizzard, Leon Lett blowing the game on Thanksgiving Day, or this Redskins-49ers game from 2019—that Week 7 game was played in the middle of Tropical Storm Nestor, with standing water on the field, and players hydroplaning for three hours straight. The final score was 9-0.
No one wants that every week, in every game, but the possibility that any team’s gameplan can be upended by forces beyond their control is very much part of the value proposition with football. Flipping from Eagles-Titans, in perfect Nashville conditions, to Bears-Vikings, in a Chicago monsoon, was great last Sunday. The Bears scored 59 points in Week 1 and could only muster 3 points in that nasty weather. That’s beautiful to me; that’s what they’re trying to take from us.
This Michael Irvin tweet? They’re taking that too.
And here, as I get preemptively sentimental over the version of pro football we had before NFL owners decided that what they really wanted to do was host concerts in the dead of winter, I do return to capitalism. The big, dramatic arguments about what is and isn’t working are now familiar (good takes here, here, and here), but one observation that generally gets lost in the shuffle of all those conversations is that free markets behaving efficiently tend to make life less interesting.
Markets produce goods, but not good taste. Corporate actors crave centralized solutions, predictability, and efficiency, and all of that will generally come at the expense of risk, character, and flavor. Handed a ribeye, markets will seek to transform it to filet mignon. Or, sticking with sports: handed a college football universe that was once dominated by five conferences from different parts of the country, each with distinct regional styles and rivalries, the efficient work of an unregulated free market has yielded a version of college football that today orbits two mega-conferences. Every team now recruits nationwide, stylistic differences have faded, and everything builds to a 12-team playoff that has nuked the stakes of what used to be the best regular season in sports.
The qualitative downsides of a corporate culture geared to pure profit maximization can be subtle and hard to measure against top line growth that’s easily quantified, but that doesn’t mean they’re not real. Refinement culture is everywhere once you know what you’re looking at, and confronted with evidence of these trends, everyone agrees that modern life is less charming than it used to be. The more profound concern is that a corporate allergy to risk and the market’s indifference to preserving variety can eventually yield a cultural inability to cope with discomfort, along with a consumption-driven economy that’s built on consuming an economy of products that are all fundamentally forgettable.
Among people who can sense these shifts as they happen, there is limited recourse. Without leaders who have a clear recognition of cultural and structural ideals, as well as an impulse to preserve them, we’re left pining for regulations that would preserve them for us. Or, more often, we’re left lamenting the absence of those regulations when it’s already too late. In pro football, the stadiums are already being built. By 2031, the majority of games will be played indoors, in perfect conditions.
If readers were unaware of this trend across the NFL (as I was, until last week), then I’m sorry to be the bearer of this disturbing news. The new ETFE roofs are translucent, soon to be omnipresent, and they’re admittedly pretty sleek; what we’re losing, though, is texture.
Sharp Text is extension of the Stratechery Plus podcasts Sharp Tech, Greatest of All Talk, and Sharp China. To subscribe and receive weekly posts via email, click here.