Flipping Charlotte’s stadium from NFL to MLS comes with pressure, and a reminder
Hidden underneath one of the lower-bowl sections of Bank of America Stadium, just outside one of the venue’s four tunnels to the field, there’s an explanation of how the impossible will become possible.
It’s on a white board.
That board sits in this open garage space, just outside the windowless office of Danny Losito, the director of sports fields and grounds at Tepper Sports and Entertainment. It’s Sunday. That means it’s been about an hour since the Carolina Panthers’ matchup with the Buffalo Bills concluded, which means it’s about 5:30 p.m., which means the 12 grounds crew warriors have another 10.5 hours of work staring them down before everything is done and they can all go home.
That’s what the board says, at least.
“They all believe we’ll be under 4 a.m.,” says Losito. He’s referring to the right side of this white board with multicolored scribbles on it that shows predictions as to when the group will be done with “flipping the field” from football to fútbol — changing the field from one suitable for a Carolina Panthers regular-season game Sunday into one suitable for a Charlotte FC practice set for 11 a.m. Monday.
Almost everyone is taking the under.
Losito, meanwhile ...
“They know if I’m the opposite, they’re going to try to prove me wrong,” he says. The 34-year-old Cary, North Carolina, native then smiles. “Jedi mind tricks.”
The reason for such an organized test of endurance is because Charlotte’s largest venue is setting the stage for what is hoped to be a special moment in city history. Charlotte FC, after all, is hosting a playoff series in Bank of America Stadium that starts on Tuesday. Kickoff is at 6:55 p.m.
Such a moment comes with pressure. All privileges like these do. This one manifests beyond the players and the coaches, though; it requires the hands of more than 2,700 people flipping a venue from a football experience to a soccer one in less than 48 hours.
But again, like how players and coaches perceive pressure, it can’t be forgotten: Such an endurance test is only possible because there will be a major-league postseason game in Charlotte. Playoffs. In this city. The kind of game that could linger in a city’s consciousness forever. The kind that unites us, inspires us. Such a feat has only occurred twice in nine years across all major sports franchises — and that includes Charlotte FC of MLS, the Carolina Panthers of the NFL and the Charlotte Hornets of the NBA. (The most recent one was Charlotte FC in 2024.)
What must also not be lost in all this: Charlotte’s three franchises are at or over .500 for the first time in the city’s history. The Panthers have won three of their last four. The Hornets are 2-1, fresh off a LaMelo Ball triple-double. Charlotte FC has an MLS-record nine consecutive wins to its 2025 resume already — and is fourth in the Eastern Conference as it charges into what the team and its coach and supporters pray will be its deepest playoff run yet.
Flipping the field in many ways feels like a city flipping a script.
Losito feels that. He also, at this moment on Sunday evening, is more concerned about all the stuff he needs to do — and the fact he has until 4 a.m. to do it. Among he and his team’s duties: remove the NFL benches and replace them with soccer ones; remove the field goal posts; hop in a P-Rex machine that safely scrubs the football lines off the field without damaging the turf; calmly and precisely lay down waterproof paint that will be soccer-ready by the next day.
“We’re used to it now,” Losito says of the pressure. “But we used to feel it a lot. The first couple of times. And when it’s overnight from game-to-game, you can’t fail. So that’s really intimidating.”
He continues: “But we’re pretty confident in what we can do now. We’ve been doing it for quite a while.”
He then hops on this Zamboni-looking machine, connects his headphones to his Spotify playlist that spins Alicia Keys and Billy Joel and Bach — yes, classical music helps him concentrate when he paints — and joins the rest of his crew, back to work.
Talking everything beyond the Bank of America Stadium field on Friday
“Well,” Caroline Wright said, staring at her iPhone.”This has been stressing me out.”
It was Friday, three days before the Panthers football game and the field conversion and the two-day turnaround, and the Tepper Sports and Entertainment chief venues officer was studying the Charlotte forecast for the next four days. Rain. Cold. More rain. The Tuesday evening kickoff between Charlotte FC and New York City FC is expected to be wet and in the high 40s — colder than the temperatures in New York at the same time.
There are many reasons she’d say this. It could make fans apprehensive to come to the game if the weather’s lousy. Charlotte FC head coach Dean Smith told reporters that approximately 34,000 tickets had been sold as of Monday morning — which is pretty remarkable considering it had eight days to market the game’s time and place set by MLS and sell tickets — but ensuring that the experience was well-worth it is another task. It could impact the timing of the field’s preparedness for training Monday, too — after all, they can paint the field in the rain but not in other conditions, like flooding, or lightning, for instance.
But it could also be something else:
For as much planning that goes into a stadium flip of this magnitude, after all — the weather is the variable that isn’t in Tepper Sports’ hands.
And there’s a lot of planning.
“This is how many pages of detail you’re going through,” Wright said, parsing through at least a dozen pages filled with tasks in 11-point font. “This is everything going on in a game.”
Some questions such a list answers:
- What sort of fan activations — activities typically put on with corporate sponsors — are we doing?
- Are supporters going to have a Tifo? No Tifo? How will winds play into that? Will weather prevent them from doing a March to the Match?
- How many pyrotechnics need to be replenished? (A key tradition for Charlotte FC, after all, is to set off fireworks at one point in the supporters-sung national anthem, as well as during goals.)
- Any Apple TV / linear broadcast-specific accommodations necessary?
- How about the LED ribbons in the stadium? What about the video boards outside the stadium? Are those ready?
- How about pregame entertainment? Will there be a flyover? Is that even possible with the government shutdown? (Such a question has been a topic of conversation in the sports-entertainment world.)
- And — this may be listed last but is very much not the least important — is the facility clean? “Our total square feet all-in is 2.8 million,” Wright said. That’s including the garage areas that visitors won’t use. “So let’s call it even at a million square feet. We have to clean a million square feet in basically 48 hours: You’ve got to do the team spaces at the zero level to be ready for the teams (for Monday practice), and then you’ve got another day to get ready for fans.”
There’s plenty more, too.
A trip down the concourses in Bank of America Stadium
On Monday, the day before the playoff game, there was still a lot to do. But there was also a lot done.
If you took a trip on the hallways on the field level, by the loading truck bays on the property, you would’ve noticed fresh hot dog buns and non-perishable food items and crates and crates and crates of beer. (Hosting an event that distributed 73,505 tickets requires a lot of ... replenishment.)
Seth Hennes, the vice president of hospitality and strategy at Levy Restaurants, is in charge of all concessions for the game Sunday. A big part of his job Monday has been taking the nonperishable items from the 500 level — the upper bowl will not be used in the Charlotte FC game as it was in the Carolina Panthers game — and moving it to where they need it for Tuesday. That also includes replenishing food and supplies.
It also means ensuring that the luxury cuisine is taken care of: In certain VIP parts of the stadium, fans will have game-day fare as well as “elevated fare” ready for them: steak, sushi, wild-mushroom flatbreads, taco/nacho stations. Since the team is hosting New York City FC, their featured meal in these luxury suites is Italian sausage pasta and braised short rib and garlic knots — and for dessert New York style cheesecake.
It also means ensuring that the various volunteer groups — non-profit groups who operate the concessions — are accounted for and prepared to work on short notice. It helps because many of those nonprofit groups have worked with the team for years — one group, The Knights Of Columbus, has been affiliated with the Uptown venue back when it was called Ericsson Stadium — but it’s still difficult. After all, the team only got the date to play eight days before putting on the event ... and who knows how long this playoff run, and thus this unpredictability, will last?
For Hennes, the most telling part of a successful flip is when fans enjoy their experience without noticing any differences.
“As long as the guest doesn’t see the ducks’ legs under the water, right?” Hennes said. “That’s the ultimate testament to what the team was able to do.”
Same goes for the team store — the one facing Mint Street in Uptown — as well as the nine other stores in the stadium that have to swap out its Carolina Panthers gear with its Charlotte FC gear. (There are 13 team stores in total in Bank of America Stadium; but three of which are on the upper-bowl level and those won’t be needed for Tuesday.)
“It’s pretty simple,” said Dennis Soden, general manager of retail for Fanatics with the Carolina Panthers and Charlotte FC. He works with about eight to 10 people, he said, and it takes close to the whole day for the conversion to happen. “But we are a very well-oiled machine. We’ve done this for three years, four years since Charlotte FC has been in here. So we figured it out.
“We have a great, great process. My assistant managers and our retail associates are incredible. They worked their tails off, and we’ve really figured it out.”
‘Oh my gosh, we’re ready for this’
The weather is unpredictable. The planning is stressful. The nights on the field stretch into mornings. The flips at a dual-use facility like Bank of America Stadium only happen to be flipped again, and again, and again, til forever — and the longer Charlotte FC sticks around in the playoffs, the turnarounds could keep getting shorter and shorter.
Wouldn’t it be easier if—
Begin to pose this question to Wright, and she’ll politely smile and offer that aforementioned reminder: Such work — such pressure — is a privilege.
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Such a feat of flipping this venue in such a short time tells you of how close you are to something real, something extraordinary. Wright was reminded of it this week, just as she hopes the city is, too.
“There’s no greater moment,” Wright said, “than walking out onto the field and being like, ‘Oh my gosh, we’re ready for this.’”
This story was originally published October 28, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
