One of my favorite topics in sports business is stadium architecture. Once an afterthought for sports fans, stadium projects have become increasingly ambitious and complicated. Many sports franchises are now trying to maximize real estate-related revenue to protect themselves from the eventual demise of cable television.

The Braves have the Battery in Atlanta. The Bucks have the Deer District in Milwaukee. The Cardinals have Ballpark Village in St. Louis. Team-owned venues across the country are printing cash, like Sofi Stadium in Los Angeles, which is owned by Rams owner Stan Kroenke and made ~$20 million from Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour.

This is why many people were surprised when the Buffalo Bills released renderings for their new stadium. Located directly across the street from the team’s current stadium, the NFL’s northernmost team chose an open-air stadium rather than a dome.

This is controversial because taxpayers are covering $850 million of the $2 billion in construction costs. That was the most public money ever committed to building an NFL stadium until the Tennessee Titans surpassed the Buffalo Bills in April when they received $1.2 billion in state and local funding for their new stadium in Nashville.

You can argue that Erie County’s $250 million contribution is worth it because keeping an NFL team in Buffalo financially benefits local businesses. However, New York State is also contributing $600 million to the project, even though 99% of New York residents will never visit the venue or see any financial benefit from its construction. Since it will be an outdoor venue, taxpayers won’t have access to other premium events during the winter, like the Super Bowl, Final Four, or concerts.

Bills fans will tell you this is all part of the “Bills Mafia” experience. Team owner Terry Pegula has even explicitly said that football is meant to be played outdoors.

But platitudes aside, Buffalo gets a lot of snow during the winter. The Bills’ current stadium doesn’t have a heated field, like Green Bay or Kansas City, and the team routinely pays fans $20 an hour to shovel snow out of the stadium before home games.

So, rather than just building a carbon copy of the team’s current stadium across the street, the Bills have worked with some of the world’s best stadium engineers to creatively design a stadium that mimics an indoor venue while still being outdoors.

The Buffalo Bills hired Populous as its architectural design firm for the team’s new stadium. Populous is a name you might have come across in the past because they have built many of the world’s largest and nicest sports venues, including Tottenham Stadium in London, Kyle Field at Texas A&M, and Yankee Stadium in New York City.

Buffalo’s new stadium will be in the parking lot across the street from its current stadium. Once construction is complete, the Bills will demolish the team’s current stadium, switching places by converting the land into a parking lot for the new venue.

The new stadium will have the same name as the old one, Highmark Stadium. There will be about 10,000 fewer seats than the current stadium. Fans can access a wide range of tickets, from luxury suites to standing-room-only and watch party options.

While that might sound similar to every new multi-billion-dollar NFL venue built over the last decade, the Bills new stadium will also have a few unique attributes.

For starters, the new Highmark Stadium includes a canopy. This canopy will cover 64% of the seats to protect fans from rain and snow. The seats will sit at a 34-degree angle, close to the maximum incline allowed by law and up from the 28-degree angle in the old stadium. This will bring fans in the top row 54 feet closer to the field.

The Bills are placing stadium speakers right underneath this canopy. Stadium architects have started employing this design more often because, when combined with the inclined seats, all stadium noise bounces off the canopy and returns to the field, artificially inflating crowd noise throughout the venue.

The canopy doesn’t just protect fans from rain and increase sound. The canopy will include the world’s largest snow melt system. Designed in the shape of a V, the canopy has sensors built into it to detect moisture. The canopy will then use heaters to melt the snow, transporting it outside the stadium through an intricate system of pipes.

The playing field will consist of natural grass instead of artificial turf, and unlike the team’s current stadium, it will have a heating unit underneath it. Like the Packers setup in Green Bay or the Chiefs setup in Kansas City, the Bills will now be able to wirelessly control the temperature of the field, allowing them to heat the field during snowy winter months so players don’t feel like they are being tackled on concrete.

The Bills are also putting a giant SubAir system underneath the field. This is the same system that Augusta National Golf Club has beneath all its greens (and even its walkways after a patron slipped and fell at the Masters). SubAir systems are great because they help you control the condition of the playing field, using a vacuum to suck out moisture when it’s too wet or pushing air into the grass to help with aeration.

Even better, when you combine that SubAir system with a set of UV grow lights, the Bills will now be able to grow near-perfect grass year-round regardless of the weather.

The stadium’s exterior will be fitted with thousands of steel panels. These panels look good. But more importantly, they help prevent wind from entering the stadium. Instead, the stadium’s unique design will push wind over it, helping keep fans warm whether they are traveling through the covered concourse or sitting in their seats.

Players will be happy, too. Rather than keeping all the best tech in a nearby practice facility and adding only a bare-bones setup to the gameday stadium, the Bills’ new venue will have state-of-the-art locker rooms, weight rooms, saunas, steam rooms, medical rooms with X-ray machines, team dining facilities, and coaches ‘ offices.

Home and away teams currently use the same tunnel to access the field from the locker rooms. However, Buffalo’s new stadium layout will have multiple tunnels. That means players and personnel on home and away teams will never interact on gameday.

And since the new Highmark Stadium will have more tech built into it than most other NFL venues, the Bills are adding an entirely separate building next door. This 18,000-square-foot technology building will sit directly south of the stadium, housing everything from the broadcast server room to the stadium’s in-house wifi system.

Many people will still complain that Buffalo didn’t go with an indoor venue. The most common argument is that an outdoor venue prohibits Buffalo from hosting other premium events, like the Super Bowl or College Football Playoff National Championship. And since taxpayers are fronting nearly half the construction cost, that money should be put into a venue that can be used by those taxpayers year-round.

However, I think about it differently. We can squabble for hours about whether the Bills should receive even a dollar of taxpayer money for the stadium. The Pegula family is worth billions, and having 100% control of an asset subsidized with $850 million in taxpayer money will only further elevate the team’s $4.2 billion valuation.

“Socialize costs, privatize profit,” as my friend Andrew Brandt likes to say.

But the reality is that Buffalo would never receive any of those events anyway. Buffalo is the NFL’s second-smallest city, with a population of 275,000. The city doesn’t have the infrastructure to get awarded any of those events, and at least Buffalo’s ownership group decided to keep the team and the city’s culture intact by switching things up.

We have entered a world where all new sports venues look the same. Indoor. Giant screens. A plethora of luxury suites. But when is enough enough? We already have Sofi Stadium in Los Angeles. US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis is fantastic. And I think the Clippers will win awards for their fan-first design at the new Intuit Dome.

But there is also a place for the alternative. There is something special about the old urinal troughs in Pittsburgh or the homes surrounding Lambeau Field in Green Bay.

The Bills new stadium might not have the same bells and whistles as some of the NFL’s most expensive venues, but it doesn’t need to. Bills Mafia likes things just the way they are, and that culture is exactly what makes Buffalo’s fan base so special.

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