Nashville, Atlanta will each host Super Bowl in next 5 years. Why not Charlotte?

The biggest event in American sports each year is the Super Bowl, a gargantuan “get” that is coveted around the country.

The neutral-site game rotates to a different NFL stadium each year, and in the next five years it will twice be played in the South. Atlanta has the 62nd Super Bowl in 2028, hosting the big game for the fourth time. And just this week, Nashville was announced as the host for the 64th Super Bowl in 2030.

So why not Charlotte? Will the Queen City ever host a Super Bowl?

I made a number of calls this week to people who know something about this, speaking to them on background. The short answer boils down to something like this: You can never say never, but it’s not happening anytime soon.

Why? After all, Charlotte is the 14th-biggest city in America. Nashville is 23rd. At No. 21, Charlotte is also a larger media market than No. 26 Nashville (and No. 22 Raleigh-Durham is bigger than Nashville on that scale, too). And you could argue that there is no hotter city in the country: Recent census data revealed that no other U.S. city added more people in the past year than Charlotte.

Charlotte has a lot of what the NFL normally wants in Super Bowl host cities, which is included but not limited to thousands of hotel rooms, a stadium within easy walking or driving distance of other activities and strong local leadership.

Here’s what Nashville has that Charlotte doesn’t, though: A brand-new stadium that includes a dome and debuts in the 2027 NFL season.

That Nashville stadium, expected to cost around $2.2 billion, was built not only to host the NFL’s Tennessee Titans but also to attract massive events like the Super Bowl or the Final Four.

The Panthers, meanwhile, are renovating 30-year-old Bank of America Stadium under the stewardship of owner David Tepper. The renovation, agreed to in 2024 by the Charlotte City Council, committed $650 million in public funding to update the stadium in a public-private partnership.

Tepper Sports and Entertainment committed $150 million then for immediate renovations and $421 million more for anticipated future renovation costs. Importantly, there will be no dome placed on the stadium, which would have cost hundreds of millions of additional dollars. The stadium will be open to the elements, just as it always has been, as it continues to host the Panthers, Major League Soccer’s Charlotte FC franchise and various big-name concerts.

And for most of the year, especially in the fall, an open-air stadium feels fine. Preferable, even. But the Super Bowl, as we all know, is in February.

Because February feels very much like winter in most of the country, the NFL generally puts its Super Bowls either in warm climates (California, Florida) or in domes (Atlanta, Nashville, Detroit). A cold-weather Super Bowl held in the New Jersey/New York area in 2014 was a notable exception, but MetLife Stadium was less than four years old at the time. Recent studies have estimated the economic impact a Super Bowl has on a region in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

There is no exact NFL rule against holding a Super Bowl in a 30-year-old, domeless stadium with iffy weather like Charlotte’s in February. And don’t tell me it’s not iffy. If you live here, you know well that it could be 70 degrees and sunny in February, or it could be 30 degrees and snowing.

But while there is no rule against it, I don’t think we will ever see a Super Bowl at Bank of America Stadium. Much more likely in the near term would be Charlotte hosting an NFL Draft, a still-enormous event but one that doesn’t have as long a list of “must-haves,” and one that would also make more sense following the completion of the stadium renovations over the next few years. So, probably in the early 2030s.

Long-term, though? I’m not counting out Charlotte hosting a Super Bowl in our lifetimes (or a Final Four for that matter — those almost always go to domed NFL stadiums, too).

Here’s the most likely scenario for that. According to the terms agreed to in 2024, Charlotte is obligated to begin discussing a new stadium by 2037.

Let’s say a new stadium is agreed upon, and you take Bank of America Stadium offline somewhere between 2041 and 2046, giving it a very respectable 45- to 50-year run.

If you’re building a new stadium anyway, at that point I’d put a retractable roof on it. That’s the way technology is moving. And who knows — maybe in 15, 20 years you can decrease the cost by having AI robots build a lot of that roof. Then you could host a Super Bowl, a Final Four, a College Football playoff final and whatever else you want.

But for now? Nashville and Atlanta have a better setup to host a Super Bowl. Those are just the facts.

Charlotte has a lot of sports events coming here — we will see the MLS All-Star game, the ACC football championship and a “March Madness” NCAA regional in the next 12 months. But we’re not going to see a Super Bowl in Charlotte anytime in the next 15 years.

In 20-25 years, though? I wouldn’t be surprised.

Scott Fowler

The Charlotte Observer

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Columnist Scott Fowler has written for The Charlotte Observer since 1994 and has earned 26 APSE awards for his sportswriting. He hosted The Observer’s podcast “Carruth,” which Sports Illustrated once named “Podcast of the Year.” Fowler also conceived and hosted the online series and podcast “Sports Legends of the Carolinas,” which featured 1-on-1 interviews with NC and SC sports icons and was turned into a book. He occasionally writes about non-sports subjects, such as the 5-part series “9/11/74,” which chronicled the forgotten plane crash of Eastern Air Lines Flight 212 in Charlotte on Sept. 11, 1974. Support my work with a digital subscription