St. Louis’ CityPark is for and reflective of its city, with concessions tech driving fresh innovation

On a quiet, sunny September afternoon, Matt Sebek is ready to give another tour of CityPark as he greets a visitor pitch-side at the year-old soccer-specific stadium in St. Louis.

He’s led well over a hundred such private tours to interested parties, many from the sports industry. That it’s Sebek, the chief experience officer, giving the tour is “very intentional,” St. Louis City SC Chief Brand Architect Lee Broughton said, because it’s two of Sebek’s main responsibilities — the venue’s food and beverage experience and the tech stack that enables much of it — that help differentiate the $458 million stadium from its contemporaries.

The stadium, designed by HOK and Snow Kreilich, reflects a club that knew to localize the venue in every way possible, starting with food and drink. When St. Louis City asked fans to suggest local restaurants to consider including in the stadium’s F&B program, it received 10,000 submissions from the public.

Technology was equally important. The stadium is truly post-pandemic; it’s never accepted a paper dollar or ticket. The club took advantage of its extra year of preparation — its first MLS season was bumped back one year to 2023 because of the pandemic — by incorporating more fan experience tech into CityPark’s original design. But the club’s ownership group and executive team, drawing from its success in non-sports businesses that emphasized mobile and digital customer experiences, was already moving that way.  

“It’s like when you see someone that can really ride a horse, you can hardly see them move, you can hardly see the instructions,” said Julie Snow, founding principal of Snow Kreilich, about the ownership group.

The result is a stadium that’s unique in many ways, certainly for MLS.

It’s the only club with its team business offices, training facility, team store and stadium located in a contiguous 31-acre setting amid a major city, all of which are connected to the same fiber internet network. The fiber network, according to AmpThink CEO Bill Anderson, is novel for a project in the $500 million range — “it’s basically Little SoFi [Stadium],” he said. Campuswide fiber powers the first self-checkout and checkout-free technologies built into a stadium from Day 1, as well as a mobile-heavy F&B ordering system backed by MLS’s only in-house app development team.

“It felt like it was a great statement to be a new first stadium, not necessarily a brand-new old stadium,” Broughton said.

Two days after touring an empty and quiet CityPark, the venue was sold out for a Wednesday night match against the defending MLS champs, LAFC.

Standing behind the Purina (headquartered in St. Louis) pet loge boxes (the only such seating product that includes ticketed animals in pro sports) eating mobile-ordered Bosnian kebab fries (the largest population of Bosnians outside Sarajevo lives in St. Louis), while glancing up at the flashing and quirky City Haiku signs perched above the East concourse that pulse “One” … “City” … (designed by Kiku Obata, whose dad, Gyu, was the “O” in St. Louis-based architecture firm “HOK”), this was clearly a modern live sports experience specific to its city.

“It is so local, it is so built on St. Louis and the experience of St. Louis food and beverage and culture and music,” Snow said. “It just seems so about the place.”

The 5 pillars

St. Louis City President and CEO Carolyn Kindle (community philanthropy), Chief Operating Officer and General Counsel Jason Thein (legal), and Broughton (brand marketing) each had complementary business expertise but no sports experience prior to the soccer project. That ultimately influenced the club’s final stadium result and its first-year on-field success (the club won MLS’s Western Conference regular-season title) in positive ways, but it wasn’t immediately clear that the experiences would translate.

“At first I was a little nervous, if I’m honest,” Broughton said, “because we didn’t really have any right to be doing this, because we didn’t really have any experience.”

The leadership team brought an intense desire to make the stadium local and create a customer experience based around technology. Before the club even had employees, Kindle, Thein and Broughton created five design pillars to guide the stadium creation process:    

■  Connection: To be artfully integrated and connected to the fabric of the neighborhood.

■  Mobility: To move people efficiently with creative use of infrastructure and technology.

■  Sport: To create a loud, proud, distinct home-field advantage.

■  Training: To bring team HQ, practice fields and an academy to St. Louis.

■  Experience: To bring 24/7/365 vitality to the neighborhood through architecture and public spaces that inspire.

Broughton: “How do we keep on this North Star when you suddenly get a waterfall of decisions that are being made over the course of two, 2½ years, to get that design element right? And it was those five principles of how we want this thing to operate that really helped us see through all that fog.”

In early plans, the stadium sat south of Market Street on the site that now holds the training ground (which was formerly a highway underpass and, for decades before that, a historic African American neighborhood once home to famous composer Scott Joplin). HOK’s Eli Hoisington (co-CEO, design principal) first sketched out the idea of moving the stadium to the north side of Market Street. That shift, following the purchase of the land, enabled the St. Louis City SC complex to materialize: The stadium north of Market Street adjoined — under the road by a tunnel — to the training ground, team store, and recently opened team business office south of Market Street.    

That enabled designers and engineers to stash critical back-of-house functions like generators, transformers and loading docks, creating a stadium with no backdoor, crucial for an urban setting to which fans arrive from all directions.

Porosity

CityPark might not have a front door, but it does have a massive yard.

Putting the stadium in the plot north of Market Street made room for the roughly 125,000-square-foot plaza, an open area on the stadium’s east side that the team has programmed robustly in its first season, whether with DJs, games, watch parties or as an open prematch gathering space.

The nearly 12-acre stadium site features a 20-foot grade differential from northwest to southwest, which contributed to the two-concourse design on the east side, the only soccer-specific stadium in MLS with two levels of concourses. Fans entering the stadium from the west side descend onto the 360-degree traversable main concourse, while those entering from the east side (about 60% of fans on average) ascend to the main level.

The pitch sits 40 feet below street level and that depth, combined with the 121-foot-deep canopy more than amply covering the east stand of the stadium and four predominantly enclosed sides, traps crowd noise inside the venue.

There were two must-haves during design that Broughton fought to preserve, one being the expansive canopy and its soffit that’s reflective of both light and sound.

“That was quite a significant investment and when it came time for the cost engineering piece, we really went to bat for that,” said the Londoner. “And I think that’s really been something that we’ve all benefited from aesthetically but also experientially.”

The second non-negotiable was leaving the stadium’s four corners open to the exterior for visual connection with the city and the surroundings. The sights from the southeast corner of the stadium include the Gateway Mall, a string of parks connecting CityPark to the Mississippi River, and the unmistakable shape of The Arch in the distance.

It’s “the idea of creating a more porous stadium to not only allow you to be intensely focused on the game but also glance up and see the Arch,” said Snow. “This is about having the city at every match. It doesn’t tear you away from the city, it just brings you deeper into it.”

The glass-walled Michelob Ultra Club endcaps the stadium’s south end above the main concourse, giving the venue a premium club (with a completely programmable LED ceiling) with expansive views that’s been regularly utilized for soccer watch parties and non-soccer events; the stadium has held 144 corporate events in total this year, whether in the Mich Ultra Club, field-level Pitch Club, or the Hellcat Bar, a space named in honor of Jack Taylor, patriarch of the Taylor family, which owns Enterprise Rent-A-Car and whose descendants own St. Louis City SC. Taylor flew a Hellcat fighter plane in World War II, taking off from the … USS Enterprise.

The Hellcat is one of the few spaces in the stadium with distinct design; CityPark is otherwise a somewhat blank canvas ready to be altered by the ubiquitous LED installations that color and personalize the building’s mostly white or concrete surfaces. The stadium’s interior experience is intense, but the exterior is unimposing, and the partly sunken stadium fits well with the surroundings.

“There is not a lot of building mass, which has a great look to it,” said Donnie Roberts, ME Engineers associate principal.

Baked-in tech

To the ownership group, it felt like an important statement for something new, first and tech-heavy to be in St. Louis, a city whose public image has taken a beating in recent decades. Sebek had already been in conversation with the club for nearly a year when he was hired from World Wide Technology, where he designed digital customer experiences for clients such as Wegmans, Panera, Papa John’s Pizza, Enterprise Rent-A-Car and the St. Louis Blues.  

“We hired Sebek really early because we wanted somebody who understood technology in a way that we didn’t,” said Broughton.  

The tech focus only increased following the onset of the pandemic, which provoked wider societal adoption of cashless purchasing, and elevated the importance of connectivity as the underlying backbone for the fan experience the club would create. The campuswide fiber network AmpThink designed and built — fiber provides the fastest speeds, highest bandwidth, and lowest latency of any internet connection type — runs an underground loop from CityPark to the training facility and the new business office, before circling back to the plaza in front of the stadium. The segmented system isn’t overly reliant on any one portion in case of outages. 

The benefits for the club are numerous; for example, increasing what’s possible with game presentation inside the stadium. New content could be created mid-match at the business HQ and piped into the stadium. On the sporting side, increased data-tracking and storage capabilities and the ability to move and keep large video files for scouting opponents or potential signings or monitoring players recovering from injury are all vital. And the club’s maintenance crew is connected to the campus network, as are all its mechanical systems, enabling overarching monitoring of the campus with a single platform.  

“We’re taking that capital expenditure that happened up front and rather than using it for the limited number of days that the venue is in operation, we’re spreading that capital value across that broader campus that’s being used every day,” said Anderson. 

The network is handling six terabytes of data per game, a strong number for a 22,500-seat stadium, and it’s set up for further personalization and monetization of fan experiences in the future. The network asset becomes more valuable if the club’s owners purchase more land around the stadium. The districtwide network idea in sports-anchored mixed-use developments thus far has been limited to much larger properties like SoFi Stadium and Hollywood Park. 

“St. Louis took that on, took that approach at a more rational level,” Anderson said. “The argument has been with most people we speak to is, ‘Hey, you can’t do SoFi at a small scale … at the $400 million, $500 million level.’ And our point is that’s not accurate.”  

Also sitting on the fiber backbone is a mobile-centric F&B setup designed to cope with a soccer-specific stadium’s fan experience peculiarities, like 3,000 fans seated in CityPark’s supporters section all spilling onto the concourse during a 15-minute halftime. The club has encouraged arriving early at the stadium to eat, a campaign that resulted in 64% of all food orders occurring before kickoff.  

“We could design a stadium with that expectation on Day 1 if fans want mobile order-ahead. The ability for us to be new and not have to retrain behaviors was really big,” said Sebek. “So, we went big on mobile order-ahead.” 

Order ahead

That effort produced City Go, the club’s branded mobile order-ahead program that lives within the team app and includes wayfinding signage around the stadium. Ten concessions outlets were included in City Go this season; mobile order-ahead made up at least 20% of its F&B revenue, and as high as 45% in some cases. Eighty percent of the stadium’s capacity is season-ticket holders, so it makes sense that those adoption and usage numbers could rise in the coming years.

St. Louis City’s app was built in-house by a four-person development team, with new updates released each month. The club released the app and began pushing content 18 months before the first match (partly due to the delayed debut season), which drove earlier adoption and increased familiarity among fans ahead of CityPark’s opening.

Anything a fan would need at a game — access to their tickets, food ordering, scan and pay or loaded funds in their app digital wallet, an interactive stadium map and game-day parking and weather info — resides in the app, alongside content concerning the team. In-venue F&B transactions that occurred through the mobile app, including loaded value, accounted for nearly a quarter of all transactions this season and the club ended its debut season with more than 131,000 active weekly app users, six times the stadium’s capacity.

“The building can’t grow, and it’s sold out every game,” said Sebek, a former college soccer player at Evansville. “The app is a way for people outside the stadium to get in, get behind the scenes, get content, and when they do come to the game, they’re in it, they know it, they trust it, and we’re seeing mobile order-ahead jump. All these things have come full circle for us in a really neat way.”

The food and beverage experience, including the tech behind it, influenced the stadium’s design much earlier than usual, said HOK’s Chris Devolder. The architects met Sebek within the first months of design beginning and concessionaire Levy was involved more than two years before the stadium opened. Mobile order pickup windows (and restroom entrances) sit outside the flow of the concourse to limit congestion, and F&B stands on the east side of the stadium are two-sided to also serve customers outside on the plaza.

“I’m now spoiled by that opportunity,” said Devolder, who is now helping design NYCFC’s new soccer stadium. “Typically, the food service provider comes on late in the design process and there are all sorts of changes, and it doesn’t necessarily benefit what they call the food story.”

With the first season delayed, further tech supplements were incorporated into the design, including three Zippin checkout-free markets and 12 Mashgin units spread across other stands, making CityPark one of the first stadiums in the U.S. with those technologies baked in from Day 1.

The implications of the checkout free stores were numerous, said ME Engineers’ Roberts. How would Zippin stores, with their turnstile entrances, react if a fire alarm sounded? How much power and what levels of light would be needed for cameras and sensors? Lessons learned will be reused in the coming years as checkout-free and self-checkout service styles become fundamental aspects of new stadium designs.

Two of the Zippin markets sit behind the supporters section, serving five hot food items from Antonino’s (purveyors of St. Louis’ famous toasted ravioli) and pizza by the slice from Pie Guy. The Zippin markets replaced what was originally designed as two traditional concession stand lines with seven points-of-sale, a format that was blown up when the club was given its extra year by MLS.

“Our average transaction times here are, like, 70 seconds, so it services that need of speed,” Sebek said.

The star of the show

CityPark has 52 F&B locations, about double the usual number for a stadium of similar size. By spreading popular food stands around the stadium, queuing and wait times were reduced. 

“We’ve got about double the points of distribution, but that only works if they’re all desirable,” Sebek said. “So, that’s where this idea of if they’re all local small businesses that were all desirable, we could really split those lines up.”

Early in creating CityPark’s food program, the club received significant financial offers from restaurant chains in exchange for inclusion in the stadium’s F&B ranks. But the ownership group’s North Star — the importance of CityPark being of, about, and for St. Louis — twinkled, and all the offers were declined.  

“We were able to get comfortable with the fact that we were leaving money on the table,” Broughton said. “This was about shining a light on the things that are so great about St. Louis.” 

The club’s executive team learned during its early market research that St. Louisans love restaurants in their local neighborhoods, but that they rarely traveled outside their patch to other areas of the metro area to try different restaurants or cuisines.  

“It struck us as something we could perhaps play a role in helping,” said Broughton.  

Local restaurateur Gerard Craft helped weave together a vibrant and diverse but coherently St. Louis food program. The 10,000 suggestions included restaurants ranging from Bosnian to Senegalese to Italian, as well as Steve’s Hot Dogs, fronted by Steve Ewing, the former lead singer of 1990s punk/ska band The Urge. 

Picking the finalists was “pretty hard,” Sebek said, smiling. “We wanted it to be diverse, delicious, but it’s also stadium, so a lot of those conversations were ‘how do you really scale?’” 

It needed to be walkable, handheld. Ramen, for example, doesn’t fit well in the stadium setting. The food that local Bosnian favorite Balkan Treat Box is selling at the stadium — including loaded fries covered in kajmak, ajvar, suho meso and pepperoni — isn’t what they sell at their restaurants.  

In the supporters section portion of the concourse, F&B stands are designed to look like street carts and sell less than a handful of items, which helps non-sports-endemic restaurateurs cope with stadium volume and shortens lines because there are fewer menu options for customers to consider. The idea is to get an item at one cart and move to another for a different part of the meal. 

“Local food is the incentive,” Sebek said. “You want to get down here; it’s not traditional stadium food. The fact this is probably one of the best food courts in the region is probably incentive enough.” 

St. Louis City SC crashed out of the MLS Cup playoffs in the first round to new rival Sporting Kansas City, and Kindle said during SBJ’s DRIVE conference in St. Louis in September that she was worried the club had set the bar too high in Year 1.

But the F&B program tells a more sustainably long-term success story.

CityPark’s top five concession stands this season were all local restaurants — Steve’s Hot Dogs, Balkan Treat Box, BEAST BBQ, FarmTruk, and The Block. And according to a year-end fan survey, over 50% of the club’s fans are looking for local restaurants they tried at the stadium out in the broader world.

“It feels like a fabulous validation of those early days,” Broughton said.