The adrenaline of a live show, the thrill of sharing air with a superstar performer and thousands of passionate fans, is difficult to replicate on a screen.
But technology is trying. Images are getting sharper, speakers subtler and streaming faster. Viewers can customize and interact with real-time content while relaxing on their couches next to snacks and a clean restroom.
Compared with the $92.98 average ticket price for a National Football League game or $200 for good seats at a Katy Perry concert, ordering in for entertainment is getting ever more appealing to consumers. And if the most important words for developers working on the next generation of arenas are location, location, they’re followed closely by diversify, diversify, diversify.
The English soccer club Tottenham Hotspur's new stadium, set to open next year in London, will accommodate multiple sports with a field that can retract to reveal artificial turf to host N.F.L. games. T-Mobile Arena, the home of the N.H.L.’s Vegas Golden Knights, has two towers jutting from the interior, each serving as part-time viewing platforms and, occasionally, nightclubs. And plans for a 60,000-seat football stadium for the Washington Redskins include a recreational moat that can be used for kayaking and surfing in the summer and ice-skating in the winter, while its external skin could double as a climbing or rappelling wall．
“People have so many opportunities at their fingertips to seek out the type of entertainment they want,” said Brian Mirakian, senior principal at Populous Activate, a firm that helped design the new Yankee Stadium and several Olympic stadiums. “Having the drawing power necessary to pull those people into our buildings has never been more critical.”
Jewel box venues like Fenway Park and Wrigley Field have survived on the charm they bring to baseball, but large single-purpose sites had mostly fallen out of favor by the mid-1960s. The concrete doughnuts that followed － which tried to mash baseball and football fields into the same space － struggled to effectively exhibit either sport. And single-purpose designs returned to the norm in the 1990s.
But the same concerns that led to the development of those rarely mourned multipurpose stadiums persist today. Single-sports structures can often lie fallow for much the year, in some cases marooned by sprawling parking lots on the outskirts of cities.
Although the cost of some new stadiums has pushed beyond $1 billion, a key revenue stream shows signs it might not be the reliable income generator it once was: Weekly attendance at N.F.L. games has been mostly down this year （even before players began protesting comments by President Trump）, and attendance at Major League Baseball games, while still high, has also declined slightly in recent years.
That has only intensified the need for new buildings to do double （or more） duty. Some large venues are increasingly catering to nontraditional events like monster truck rallies, marathons, black-tie banquets and conferences. MetLife Stadium, the home of the New York Jets and the Giants, hosted a Bollywood awards show in July.
But event planners often find that convention centers are better suited to their needs, with superior lighting and audiovisual options, extensive catering facilities and the ability to partition off floor space into multiple rooms, said Jack W. Plunkett, chief executive of Plunkett Research.
Industrywide tracking of supplemental revenue from one-time events is patchy at best. Still, “stadium managers want to maximize ancillary income from stadium event rental, but there are a lot of challenges and the competition is fierce for those dollars,” he said.
