Stadium Changeovers: How a Football Pitch Becomes a Concert Floor

Why is grass the hardest part of a stadium changeover?

A top-level football pitch is a farmed crop. It needs light, air, water and not too much weight on it. A concert asks for the opposite: a stage weighing hundreds of tonnes, forklifts and cranes driving across the surface during the build, and a standing crowd packed onto it for hours.

Venues have three basic answers. They can cover the grass, replace it afterwards, or move it out of the way entirely.

How do stadiums protect the pitch during concerts?

The classic approach is a temporary floor laid over the pitch. The best-known supplier, Terraplas, started out protecting the turf at the old Wembley and has since supplied more than two million square metres of turf protection to venues around the world, from the Stade de France to River Plate in Buenos Aires.

The clever part is that many of these panels are see-through. Terratrak Plus, one widely used system, is made of translucent high-density polyethylene, so daylight still reaches the grass underneath and it can carry on growing for a while. The tiles are about 1.2 metres square, light enough to lift by hand at around 23 kg each, and they lock together into a gap-free deck that forklifts and heavy kit can drive over.

But covering only buys time. Wembley Stadium has explained that it uses two kinds of cover during concert season: a translucent one where the audience stands, which keeps the grass alive temporarily, and a heavy-duty cover under the stage and vehicle routes, which does not. Under the heavy cover the grass is written off from the start. Groundstaff actually spray it off before the covers go down, because a dead sward is quicker to strip and reseed than a half-alive one.

When the covers came off after a summer of shows, the old routine looked like this:

• clear the dead material and reseed,
• let the new grass germinate (around ten days),
• grow it on until it can take a match, roughly four weeks in total.

Grow lights help. Wembley has described using powerful lighting rigs, and later LED systems with CO2 injection, to speed recovery in the most battered areas.

Why do some stadiums replace the whole pitch?

If the old grass is going to die anyway, why wait for it to come back? In 2023 Wembley switched to a method it calls Lay and Play. A complete replacement pitch is grown at a turf farm hundreds of miles away for about 14 weeks, then cut into rolls and trucked in.

The numbers are impressive. More than 720 rolls, each 10 metres long and 1.2 metres wide, were laid in about 60 hours. Wembley says this means it can host football five days after a concert, where the old regrow-in-place method could take up to five weeks. The old pitch is not just thrown away either: the stadium separates it into grass, sand and plastic fibres so the sand can be reused.

Which stadiums can move the pitch out of the building?

The boldest venues simply take the pitch out of the building.

At the Veltins-Arena in Gelsenkirchen, home of Schalke 04, the grass sits in a giant concrete tray about 118 by 79 metres that weighs roughly 11,000 tonnes. Hydraulic presses push it along Teflon-coated rails like a drawer sliding out of a cabinet, about half a metre per push. The full move takes six to eight hours. Between matches the pitch lives outdoors, in the sun and rain, where grass is happiest. With the pitch gone, part of the lower tier folds away to make room for about 5,000 more concertgoers.

The Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London took a different route. Its grass pitch splits into three steel trays, each weighing more than 3,000 tonnes, which slide away beneath the South Stand in as little as 25 minutes. Underneath is a synthetic surface set 1.6 metres lower, used for NFL games and concerts. While the real grass is parked out of sight, grow lights, ventilation, dehumidifiers and irrigation keep it alive for up to ten days.

How long does it take to build a stadium concert stage?

Clearing the floor is only half the changeover. The other half is building the show on top of it, and stadium stages are buildings in their own right.

When the Rolling Stones brought their No Filter tour to State Farm Stadium in Arizona in 2019, about 150 workers spent four days assembling a stage made from 1,200 tons of steel delivered on 20 trucks. Load-out is faster than load-in, but it is still a long night's work after the encore.

To keep a tour moving from city to city, the biggest productions don't carry one stage, they carry several. For U2's 360° tour (2009 to 2011), the Belgian stage builder Stageco made three identical steel structures. Each set needed 38 trucks and took about five days to put up and two to take down, so while the band played one city, the next stage was already rising in another, and a third was being packed or driven. Crews call this leapfrogging.

For the venue, all of this means the "changeover" for a big concert is really a week or more of the building being given over to trucks, steel and rigging, with the pitch protection going down first and coming up last.

How do arenas switch from ice hockey to basketball?

Arenas have a different headache. Many host both ice hockey and basketball, sometimes on the same day, and making a hockey rink from scratch takes far too long to do between games. So the ice simply stays.

The trick is a sandwich. The ice remains frozen on the arena floor. On top go insulated deck panels that keep the cold in and the heat of the crowd out. On top of those goes a subfloor, and finally the basketball court itself, which arrives as a jigsaw of wooden panels.

At Chicago's United Center, the switch from Blackhawks hockey to Bulls basketball involves roughly 2,092 moving pieces: around 130 sections of boards and glass, 530 pieces of insulated decking, 232 pieces of court, plus 1,200 extra seats that only appear for basketball. A team of about 50 people does it in roughly two and a half hours.

Los Angeles' Crypto.com Arena, shared by several pro teams, has turned this into a routine. A full conversion takes about two hours. Most of the floor pieces are 4 by 8 feet; the ice covers weigh around 90 pounds and the basketball panels a little under 200, so four people usually carry each one. When the arena runs a doubleheader, around 60 people flip the building between games, and the target is to have it ready at least 90 minutes before the next tip-off. The arena had hosted more than 250 doubleheaders by 2023.

Why the schedule matters more than the machinery

What makes a changeover work is not one heroic machine but a schedule. Every venue has a sequence it repeats until it becomes muscle memory: protect the surface, get the heavy kit in while the floor is empty, build, rehearse, show, strip, restore. Each step has a deadline, and every missed deadline eats into the next event's set-up.

It is also why venues sometimes turn down good bookings. A concert on a Tuesday might be perfectly profitable on paper, but if the turf can't recover in time for a cup tie on Saturday, it isn't worth it. The real art is less about moving grass and more about choosing which events can sit next to each other on the calendar.

If you fancy juggling those trade-offs yourself, Big Night Tycoon is a stadium tycoon game where scheduling changeovers between matches, gigs and everything in between is half the fun.

Frequently asked questions

How long does a stadium changeover take?

It depends on the method. Rolling a pitch out of the Veltins-Arena takes six to eight hours, and Tottenham's retractable pitch can be out of the way in about 25 minutes, but building a big concert stage on top takes several days. Wembley says it can now host football five days after a concert by laying a fresh pitch.

Does a concert ruin the grass?

Under the stage and vehicle routes, usually yes, which is why some stadiums kill that area off deliberately and reseed or replace it afterwards. Where the audience stands, translucent flooring can keep the grass alive for a limited time.

Is the ice still there under a basketball game?

Often, yes. Arenas that host hockey and basketball keep the ice frozen and lay insulated panels and a wooden court on top, which is why a full swap takes only a couple of hours.