It’s been a busy year for Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia. After hosting the SEC Championship and Peach Bowl, the 71,000-seat venue will host next week’s College Football Playoff national championship game — all in the span of five weeks.

Add in home games for the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons and MLS’ Atlanta United, and a variety of concerts, Copa America matches, and even the Super Bowl, and Mercedes-Benz Stadium has consistently hosted hundreds of events each year since its opening.

Owned by the state of Georgia and operated by Arthur Blank’s company, Mercedes-Benz Stadium has one of the most unique designs in sports. Highlighted by eight sliding wedge-shaped “petals,” the roof creates an optical illusion, sliding open in a straight line via the push of a button to reveal direct sunlight in just eight minutes.

More importantly, Mercedes-Benz Stadium has become a blueprint for other cities and teams nationwide. It was built on a narrow plot of land, and public transportation is nearby. The concessions are some of the cheapest in professional sports, and the venues primary tenants covered $1.8 billion of the $2 billion construction costs.

It probably goes without saying, but an economic partnership like that is rare, as professional sports teams have become accustomed to socializing costs and privatizing profits. So today, we’ll explore how Arthur Blank made this happen — the finances, taxes, construction process, revenue-sharing agreements, and more.

When Falcons owner Arthur Blank initially started thinking about the type of stadium he wanted to replace the Georgia Dome, he kept coming back to the word iconic.

The venue had to withstand the test of time and present itself more as a destination than a stadium. Blank wanted the community to be proud of it while also offering them the opportunity to see events outside of the typical 8-9 NFL games each year.

So, when it came time to pick a design, Arthur Blank’s team invited five architectural firms down to Atlanta to interview with the Falcons owner. These five firms were given just six weeks to create an initial design, with the sole directive being that Blank “didn’t want to move the needle; he wanted to change the game.”

Arthur Blank’s internal team then pre-ranked the five groups based on who they thought would most likely win to prepare their boss before the meeting. The only problem? Blank loved HOK, a global architecture firm his team had ranked dead last.

HOK won the bid because they created the most unique design. Rather than starting at the base or side of the building, HOK’s Bill Johnson drew dozens of designs by starting with the roof. The idea was to create something unique that had never been done before. They built a model, brought it down to Atlanta, and called Blank up to see it during the meeting. Blank pressed a big red button on the side, and the roof of the miniature model started to close, sort of like the opening of the iris on a camera.

Blank was sold. HOK won the bid, even though everyone was quietly unsure whether the model they were looking at could even be built or how much it would cost.

“We knew right away this particular design was the most exciting, the most iconic, the most unique. But we did not understand, is it buildable and can it be built within a budget that is going to make any sense at all,” Arthur Blank said at the time.

With a design in mind, budgeting was next. Arthur Blank started by asking the city of Atlanta for $300 million in taxpayer money, with the idea being that he would privately pay for the remaining $700 million of the $1 billion construction cost.

However, after facing some backlash from taxpayers, Blank reduced his request to $200 million and got creative. Rather than the money coming directly from taxpayers, Blank introduced a proposal that gathered the cash from a hotel tax. This has become a common practice in larger cities because hotel fees are usually paid by out-of-town travelers. These travelers aren’t going to cancel their trip over a 1% tax buried in the fine print, and it is a backdoor way for taxpayers to pass the fees onto other people.

The state would still be responsible for some smaller stuff, like $24 million in public land and a $12 million pedestrian bridge outside the venue. But Blank also signed private real estate deals that paid two existing churches on the land a multiple of their fair market value to relocate, with Friendship Baptist Church receiving $19.5 million.

The unique part about this deal is that the state of Georgia would still own the physical building despite putting up a small portion of the money. In return, they would let Arthur Blank’s holding company use it for free, having him cover the operational costs but also allowing him to keep revenue from all non-NFL games.

This would have been a good deal for the city of Atlanta and the State of Georgia, but it got even better over time. Due to the unique design of the building, the project went way over budget. Blank soon raised the budget to $1.2 billion, then $1.4 billion, and then $1.5 billion. And while most reports today say that the stadium’s final cost came in around $1.5 to $1.7 billion, Blank says the actual number was closer to $2 billion.

It’s important to note that Arthur Blank was responsible for this increase. The city and state didn’t pay any additional money for the overruns. However, they did create a “waterfall fund” for the hotel tax. This meant that anything over the initial $200 million collected from the hotel tax would go into a separate account, with the additional proceeds used to fund stadium upgrades and repairs over the coming years.

That will eventually make it look like taxpayers spent more than they did on the venue. But again, this felt like a fair compromise, given that Arthur Blank was covering most of the costs, and Atlanta’s residents got a world-class venue in return.

Arthur Blank was incredibly involved in the entire process. Despite not being happy with the increased budget, Blank was all-in. He personally tested twenty different seat options for the venue, figuring out which type of padding would be most comfortable for visitors. He focused on small details, like the brightness of lighting in bathrooms, and Blank hired hundreds of local Atlanta residents to build the venue through a program called Westside Works, many formerly incarcerated with criminal records.

After seven long years — four years of planning and a three-year construction process — Mercedes-Benz Stadium officially opened its doors in 2017.

The venue was and is still largely unlike anything else in sports. The roof, for instance, is an engineering masterpiece. It beat the team’s initial automated opening goal of 12 minutes by four minutes. The 62,038-square-foot, 360-degree halo scoreboard weighs 372 tons, making it three times larger than the NFL’s next-largest LED video display.

Mercedes-Benz Stadium also has a 16-story window on the stadium’s west side that provides daylight and panoramic views of Atlanta’s skyline into the stadium. There is a massive public art display inside the venue that has 180 pieces of art by 55 artists and counting. It was the first venue in North American professional sports history to be LEED Platinum certified, effectively saying it was the country’s most sustainable sports venue. And when you combine the 20,000 parking spots within a 20-minute walk of the venue with nearby public transportation, it’s also extremely accessible.

You might hear Atlanta residents complain about public transportation options, but who doesn’t complain about their city’s public transportation? The fact that you can fly to Atlanta to attend a game while spending just a few dollars (and minutes) on a train to and from the stadium without renting a car is a setup not seen in most cities.

However, finances and accessibility are just part of the allure of Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Arthur Blank wanted to make it the best experience in sports. So, his team took inspiration from Augusta National Golf Club to lower stadium concession prices.

Fans can now buy hot dogs for $2. A pizza slice will run you $3. A soda in a souvenir cup costs $4, and if you feel like having a beer, you can pay $5 at one of the stadium’s 1,264 beer taps — nearly 45x the 30 beer taps fans had access to at the Georgia Dome.

Many owners initially thought Arthur Blank was crazy for introducing this “fan first” pricing menu. TV rights will always be the most critical line item on a team’s balance sheet, but concessions still bring in about $2 million per game for an NFL team.

This ended up having the opposite effect, though. By building out more kiosks to reduce wait times and keeping concession prices consistent across every event, including the Super Bowl, Arthur Blank revolutionized the stadium experience.

The Atlanta Falcons consistently rank No. 1 on the NFL’s annual internal survey for food quality, price-to-value ratio, speed of service, and variety. The Falcons say that the price decrease led to an 88% increase in merchandise sales in the first year. Fans are spending 16% more money on concessions than they did a few years ago, and an average of 6,000 more fans are now entering the stadium two hours before the game.

But the best indicator that the new model is working is that several other professional sports teams have copied it. From Ryan Smith and the Utah Jazz to Mat Ishbia and the Phoenix Suns, owners across North American sports are lowering concession prices for fans, understanding that a better gameday experience keeps them coming back and often leads to the eventual purchase of higher-margin items, like merchandise.

With so many new stadiums popping up over the last few years and more planned for the future, it’s fair to think that Mercedes-Benz Stadium will soon feel old. But the reality is that Falcons owner Arthur Blank has built a model for every other city.

Atlanta and its taxpayers benefited because they had visitors pay a hotel tax in exchange for thousands of new jobs and access to a surplus of world-class events, including the Super Bowl, NCAA Men’s Final Four, CFP National Championship game, FIFA World Cup matches, and concerts by Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and Jay-Z.

Arthur Blank benefited because the deal gave him total control of the venues economics, including revenue from the events mentioned above and even the time Kanye West paid $1 million a day to rent the stadium when recording his album.

More importantly, fans were the biggest winners. Mercedes-Benz Stadium has everything you would want in a venue, including a financial agreement primarily funded with private money, easily accessible public transportation to and from the venue, cheap concessions, a unique design, and access to a variety of premium events.

That combination of factors has become rare in today’s world. If a stadium is super luxurious, it is often expensive for fans. If the venue is privately funded, it usually lacks good public transportation. The list goes on and on; there are always tradeoffs.

Mercedes-Benz Stadium might not be perfect, but it’s better than most. Arthur Blank deserves a lot of credit for the vision and patience required to make it happen, and it proves owners, taxpayers, and fans can find a solution that makes sense for everyone.

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