Bank of America Stadium: The Panthers Come to Charlotte

The stadium you're passing near the center of Charlotte tells the story of a city that wanted to be a major league city, and decided not to wait.

In October of nineteen ninety-three, the NFL awarded Charlotte its twenty-ninth franchise. The man behind the bid was Jerry Richardson, a former NFL receiver from the Baltimore Colts who had used his signing bonus to open a Hardee's franchise in nineteen sixty-one, after the chain was founded, built a restaurant empire, and spent thirty years planning to bring professional football back to the Carolinas.

Richardson pioneered a funding mechanism that would become standard across American sports: personal seat licenses. Fans paid upfront for the right to buy season tickets, essentially lending the team money before a single game was played. The approach raised more than one hundred million dollars and let Richardson build the stadium largely without public money, an unusual arrangement in the era of taxpayer-subsidized stadiums.

The stadium opened August third, nineteen ninety-six, under the name Carolinas Stadium, then quickly became Ericsson Stadium under a naming rights deal with a Swedish telecom company. It became Bank of America Stadium in two thousand four.

The Panthers made a remarkable run in their second season, nineteen ninety-six, reaching the NFC Championship Game before losing to Green Bay. They would reach the Super Bowl in February of two thousand four, losing to New England, and again in February of two thousand sixteen, when they entered with a fifteen and one record before falling to Denver.

The stadium holds seventy-three thousand fans and remains one of the few major NFL venues built primarily with private money.