Stade de France Tops Pollstar’s 3Q Outdoor Stadiums / Festival Sites

The high-end totals for Pollstar’s Third-quarter Top 100 Outdoor/Festival Sites are down from last year, but the bottom-end of the chart is on the up.

Daniela Vesco / Invision for Parkwood Entertainment / AP Images – Beyonce at Stade de France
Stade de France, Paris, France

The top slot at this point in the year is held by Stade de France in Paris for the first time since we have been releasing quarterly reports for the category. The stadium has hosted Les Insus, U2, Coldplay, Guns N’ Roses and Depeche Mode in 2017.

The total number of reported tickets at the 81,338-capacity Stade de France was 508,734, a significant step down from the 815,909 Foro Sol in Mexico City reported in 2016, though that was the largest number ever reported after three quarters. Foro Sol finished last year with 999,797 tickets reported.

The second slot this year is occupied by Foro Sol with 493,245 reported tickets, which is also down from 2016’s number two of Wembley Stadium, which reported 578,560. Foro Sol has hosted multiple nights of U2, Metallica, Justin Bieber and “Vive Latino” featuring Foxygen, Rancid and many others.

In general the Top 10 are all down from 2016, but the number 100 was up. The tail slot is held by Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, at 48,162, a boost from Oakland Alameda Coliseum’s 42,897 the previous year. Virtually all of the numbers from 37 to 100 are up from last year, though the differences are much smaller than those at the top of the list.

The last point at which last year’s numbers were higher is number 36, where Atlanta’s Georgia Dome reported 112,804, several thousand above Twickenham, England’s Twickenham Stadium, which reported 108,894 in 2017.  

Overall the Top 100 moved a reported 10,955,691 tickets through the first three quarters, a substantial downtick from 2016’s 12,459,967, which may have represented a high watermark.

Conspicuously absent from 2017’s 3Q list is Empire Polo Club, which hosts Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival and Stagecoach California’s Country Music Festival. Last year we didn’t get numbers from the venue until our year-end charts, where it placed 5th overall with 420,000 tickets reported.

The data for these reports is all voluntarily submitted to Pollstar, and we highly encourage organizers to report as much data as possible.