CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Renovations to Bank of America Stadium are on the way.

Does that mean a Super Bowl in Charlotte is on the way, too?

The short answer: The stadium upgrades certainly don’t hurt the cause.

The City Council and Tepper Sports and Entertainment unveiled plans earlier this month for the largest and most expensive renovation yet to the home of the Carolina Panthers and Charlotte FC. And last week, the city agreed to send $650 million in public funds to push those renovations through — upgrades that include replacing the seats in the upper and lower bowls, updating the scoreboard, placing video boards outside the stadium, touching up safety/security enhancements and more.

Public officials and business leaders claim the renovations, which are planned to be completed in 2029, will make Charlotte home to the “best outdoor stadium in America.” And while that is an important development, that’s not the only thing the NFL considers when the league selects sites for the Super Bowl — the most-viewed annual sporting event in the nation.

What the NFL wants in a Super Bowl host site

In an email to The Charlotte Observer, an NFL spokesperson said that there are five criteria the league uses to determine whether a city is prepared to host the Super Bowl. Those criteria include “host city vision, stadium attributes, weather, hotel and venue inventory, and local partnerships (including government).”

While the “holistic picture is considered,” per the league spokesperson, some of these criteria do appear to have certain benchmarks, according to multiple media reports. One is weather. According to a CBS report in Feb. 2024, the league chooses venues that either have a roof/dome — which the Panthers will not with these renovations — or venues that have an expected average game-day temperature above 50 degrees. The average high in Charlotte the week leading up to Super Bowl Sunday this past year — from Monday, Feb. 6, 2023, to Sunday, Feb. 12, 2023 — was 59.7 degrees.

The league has deviated from these benchmarks before. For instance, in 2014, the NFL hosted the Super Bowl in the open-air MetLife Stadium in New York.

Other criteria have benchmarks, too. Sporting News reported in 2023 that the game needs to be hosted in a market that hosts an NFL team, that the venue has a minimum of 70,000 seating capacity and that hotel spaces equal at least 35% of the stadium’s capacity.

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