Empower Field at Mile High nears NFL season after busy summer concert series
The party inside Empower Field at Mile High went on all summer long.
Concert stages have been replaced with Kentucky Bluegrass for the Broncos home preseason debut Saturday night against the Cardinals. It follows a busy summer music series where several major acts — Coldplay, Post Malone, The Weeknd, Metallica and The Lumineers — filled up Denver’s NFL stadium that first opened in August 2001.
“It was our busiest June ever,” Jay Roberts, the stadium’s general manager, told The Denver Gazette. “It was 350,000 people over 19 days with five concerts.”
Metallica broke the stadium’s two-show attendance record with more than 152,000 fans in attendance.
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“We didn’t think that it was going to break the record about a month out. But as we got closer to the show and the buzz got bigger … it really sold a lot of tickets in the last couple of weeks,” Roberts said. “We had a feeling that it might break the record about a week out. It was a fantastic show. It was unusual in that each night was different. Different opening acts for both shows and they didn’t play the same song twice. They were totally different sets. I think that actually helped drive attendance for the second night.”
Roberts marveled at the Coldplay set with “pyro, confetti, light shows and PixMob bracelets” that made it “more than just a concert,” he said. Jelly Roll, who opened for Post Malone, also performed the Garth Brooks country classic “Friends in Low Places” with the entire stadium of 65,000 people singing along in unison.
“It was a lot of fun,” Roberts said.
Empower Field at Mile High enters its 24th year in operation. The continued growth of concert attendance reflects stadium design choices, upkeep, and improvements that bring global music artists coming back year after year.
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“A lot of different things go into it. I think the (Metropolitan Football Stadium District) and the Broncos have done a really good job of keeping this building relevant over the years,” Roberts said. “It was designed very well to be able to do these shows, so we have a great facility for the production of these concerts, to be able to move in and move out. It makes it easier on the production teams. The sightlines are all great. The sound is really good here in general for all of these concerts.”
The Empower Field concert lineup is already taking shape for next summer. Roberts can’t spill the details quite yet. But it is a team effort to bring some of the biggest names in music to Mile High.
“Booking a concert in a stadium usually happens at least 12 months out, sometimes longer, and on a rare occasion sometimes less,” Roberts said. “But we’ll start planning for these shows a year or two out. I’ve got a decent number of shows for 2026. There are actually already people talking about 2027. … It’s a little mini city and it moves from place to place, so to build that is a lot of work from a lot of people. That takes a great amount of planning for it to go well.”