00:01Before every game day, hundreds of people get Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta ready for NFL kickoff.
00:09But tonight's job is one of the hardest of the season, because they have under 18 hours and a big mess to clean up first.
00:18These back-to-back flips. It's the thing that everybody dreads in this industry.
00:22Just a few times a year, the stadium has major events on consecutive nights,
00:27sending cleanup crews, groundskeepers, and chefs into an overnight scramble.
00:34They have to strip and repaint the field, clean 2 million square feet of stadium,
00:40and fire up thousands of meals in cramped kitchens.
00:44We're feeding 70,000 people, so you multiply that even by two, it's 140,000 people.
00:50Senior executive chef Matt Cooper's team was ranked the NFL's best for stadium food in 2025.
00:56I always explain it as a million-piece jigsaw puzzle.
01:00If one thing is off, it throws the entire plan off.
01:07It's 8 p.m. on Saturday,
01:09and one of the biggest college football games of the year just wrapped up at Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
01:16But a sold-out NFL game kicks off 17 hours from now.
01:20Cleanup crews get busy right away, gathering 5 million pieces of confetti into piles.
01:31Really no good way to do that.
01:32Rakes, some light leaf blowers.
01:35Adam Fullerton is responsible for keeping everything on schedule.
01:39We know for months that this night's coming.
01:43You hope everything goes well, but accidents happen.
01:46He's used to the chaos because unlike most of America's football stadiums,
01:50this one stays open year-round.
01:54Electricity bills alone are up to $300,000 a month.
01:59The longer this stadium sits idle with lights on and no events, we're costing money.
02:03Since opening in 2017, it's hosted everything from the Super Bowl
02:08to four straight Beyoncé concerts, with World Cup matches coming later this year.
02:14This hectic schedule works because Americans are spending more on live sporting events than ever before.
02:21We have got to be one of the busiest stadiums in the world.
02:24It's artificial turf surface makes speedy turnarounds possible
02:32because it's quicker to restore than natural grass.
02:35But tonight, 15 groundskeepers are still racing against the clock.
02:40A vehicle with a net scoops up all that confetti.
02:44Tonight, we know our three hot areas are the center logo and the end zones.
02:49Those have to be cleaned and then repainted.
02:51So that's going to take the most time, so tackle those first.
02:55At 8.30 p.m., a vehicle called a P-Rex starts scrubbing the areas that need to be repainted.
03:01It's kind of like a zero-turn lawnmower that sprays a cleaning agent down on the painted logos,
03:06and it's got a vacuum on it that will suck that kind of paint liquid.
03:10There's a bit of an art to it.
03:11If you end up dropping too much chemical, too much liquid,
03:14your turf becomes saturated, and then you can't paint on it.
03:17If you go a little too hard or a little too deep with those brushes,
03:19you'll actually kind of burn a pattern into the turf.
03:21So again, finding a delicate balance on the P-Rex.
03:25While the field dries, cleaning crews fan out across the stadium,
03:29sweeping up hundreds of thousands of pounds of trash.
03:32Certain people are looking for plastic Dasani bottles.
03:35Certain people are looking for aluminum beer cans.
03:37And others are looking for kind of the compostable boat material that your food is served to you in.
03:42A power washing crew follows trash pickers around the stadium.
03:46They just kind of leapfrog all night.
03:48One kind of fun fact is we do not have peanut shells.
03:51When you pressure wash a peanut shell, it explodes,
03:54and it turns into, like, cement and sticks to seats and floors.
03:57When we opened the stadium, we first did offer peanut shells and learned pretty quickly,
04:01that's just, you're asking for a mess.
04:02In the stadium's back-of-house areas, crews clean out the locker rooms.
04:13All of the trash arrives at the resource recovery room,
04:16where eight workers sort through mountains of garbage in eight-hour shifts.
04:20If it hasn't been properly thrown away or recycled upstream somewhere in the building,
04:25then this is the last line of defense to catch it.
04:28The volume of waste that you're going to see over a weekend like this, it's pretty alarming.
04:32Even though waste arrives pre-sorted, each bag still has to be inspected by hand.
04:37It's a tough place to work.
04:39We've tried models of 12 members for 12 hours.
04:42It's too much time.
04:43You're tired.
04:44Your back's hurting from bending over the whole night.
04:46Adam says they recycle or compost 96% of the waste.
04:50This room will be filled again tomorrow,
04:53so an outside company will handle some of the trash.
04:56So that we free up capacity to open up the doors the next day.
05:01By 9.30 p.m., the field begins to dry,
05:04so the grounds crew can start the painting process.
05:09It'll take about six hours if everything goes as planned.
05:13We have definitely had a few nights where a large bucket of paint will be knocked over inadvertently.
05:17When it does happen, it's easily another two, three hours of work
05:19to clean that spot.
05:22Step one is measuring out all the lines and logos with a string.
05:25Stringing out your field takes a skillful eye in somebody that's paying attention.
05:30But an NFL field is more complex to paint than a college one,
05:33so tonight calls for extra focus.
05:36In a perfect world, both football fields would be the same.
05:39It's not a perfect world.
05:39One of the more intricate areas on an NFL field is the sideline,
05:43the actual players and coaches box, so the NFL is very particular about that.
05:48The college sidelines are really just kind of a big rectangle,
05:51a lot more simple to paint.
05:53We've got templates now that we've developed to make the NFL one a little bit easier.
05:57Templates help with large logos like the falcon bird at the center of the field.
06:03You're a little bit more delicate on those edges,
06:05and then you can kind of fast paint in the rest of the bubble letter itself.
06:14Painting wraps up by 3.30 a.m.,
06:17but cleaning crews will continue through the night.
06:21Scrubbing the kitchens is the hardest part.
06:23I think our main kitchen was closed for nine days last year out of the whole calendar year.
06:30They're just being cooked in all day long, so those take some time and attention.
06:34By 5 a.m., senior executive chef Matt Cooper and his team begin their day
06:38in the stadium's central kitchen.
06:41They've already spent the past two weeks preparing for today's game.
06:45We have to plan every single move that we make down to the day and the minute, really.
06:49We use a lot of analytics to come up with how much we need to produce
06:53for every single concession stand in the building.
06:55Once those orders get placed, they come in,
06:57and it takes about an entire week to produce for one game.
07:00But the job isn't done because they have to prep, assemble,
07:04and transport all the meals to eight smaller kitchens.
07:08This is the magic behind everything we do.
07:10So we have all the chefs, all the supervisors, junior sous chefs, all the cooks.
07:14I love being able to kind of visualize and see the whole team.
07:17Cooks get their marching orders on another board.
07:19So they come up to the board, look at what's next on the production sheet.
07:24So we have about 60 different food drops today, all different menus.
07:27That includes all the meals for concession stands, 200 private suites, and 50 catered events.
07:34If one thing is off, if one event is late, it throws the entire plan off.
07:38Chefs prep thousands of pounds of brisket and pork, which they smoke in-house,
07:43and assemble hundreds of salads, all while competing for space.
07:48All the way down to the science of how many pans fit inside an oven at different times throughout the day.
07:53If we could have another stadium right on top of this stadium, that would be lovely.
07:58Matt keeps an eye on last-minute deliveries throughout the day.
08:02Bread is usually the last thing that we bring in on a game day.
08:04It takes up the entire dock, so between hot dogs and hamburgers.
08:08We're talking tens of thousands of different buns that come into this building.
08:13Since 2017, Mercedes-Benz Stadium has repeatedly cut concession prices,
08:19making food cheaper than at most major U.S. sports venues.
08:22The lower prices boosted fan transactions by about 30 percent and increased food sales before kickoff.
08:36So by 10 a.m., concession stands are up and running,
08:39with chefs assembling burger and chicken tender trays for the first rush of customers.
08:44Barbecue platters hit the private suites just before the gates open to fans at 11 a.m.
08:49Around this time, fruit and sandwich platters arrive at clubs.
08:54Crews place fan giveaway items on every seat.
08:59On the field, NFL officials and equipment teams have been wheeling out gear since 7 a.m.
09:05There's probably no short of 40 to 50 road cases that come out with additional helmets and backup equipment.
09:12A lot of tech equipment, Microsoft Surface carts, all their telephone systems, their headsets.
09:16There are nights where we just laid wet paint and their equipment's got to kind of sit on the outside
09:21and wait for paint to dry, and then we can get it in.
09:25During the low before the next event, Adam takes a short break.
09:29We go to the 300 level and kind of take a seat in the bowl, snap our photo,
09:33and usually spend about 10 minutes up there and just kind of recap the night.
09:36That's usually a really good feeling because you've pulled off something difficult.
09:40You're complete. You're done with it now.
09:44At 1 p.m., the game kicks off.
09:47My favorite part of the whole day is just kickoff.
09:51When you know all the work that you put into it, it leads to the flashing lights, the cameras going off,
09:57the cheers, watching the players take the field and kick off.
09:59For me, we'll never get old, and that's why I do what I do.
10:03But Adam has to stay locked in during the game.
10:05You could have a roof leak in an upper area of the seating bowl that maybe you just don't know
10:10until a fan is sitting there, and they identify a roof leak.
10:14Premium spaces are just highly trafficked.
10:17They're actively clean during the game.
10:19The visiting Seattle Seahawks pull off a win against the home team Falcons,
10:24but the crews powering Mercedes-Benz Stadium can take a bow
10:27for pulling off another successful overnight flip.
10:31It takes an army to do what we do.
10:33The team atmosphere that we have here at Mercedes-Benz Stadium truly is magical.
10:37Matt's team sold more than 25,000 hot dogs, 10,000 slices of pizza, and over 5,000 pounds of wings.
10:46Uneaten food is donated to local charities, such as Second Helpings Atlanta.
10:51It's really difficult to prep and nail it.
10:53You never want to run out of anything.
10:55We try to capture that food working with a local partner,
10:59and that food is donated back to our community.
11:01Crews head home about an hour after the game ends.
11:04Then, they begin prepping for the next event tomorrow.
11:07I like staying busy.
11:09We want to program this building and flip as many events as possible.
11:13What we do by nature in our business is bring humans together and celebrate.
11:17The stadium is an inanimate object.
11:19It's really cool, but it's about the people that run the stadium,
11:22the people that make these events happen.
11:23So, if you don't take care of the people that do this, you're missing the point.
11:28That's what keeps me going every day.
11:29We're going every day.
11:30We'll see you later.
Comments