KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — Wallen will perform two concerts on Friday, Sept. 20 and Sunday, Sept. 22 in Knoxville. Tickets went on sale last month. He will be the sixth artist to perform in the stadium following other artists like the Jackson 5, Kenny Chesney and Garth Brooks.
Brooks headlined the last concert the stadium hosted back in 2019. He broke attendance records for the largest stadium show in the Southeast with 84,846 fans. Ryan Alpert, the university's Deputy Athletics Director, said he expects to beat that.
"I think our expectations are we, in anything we do at Tennessee Athletics, we always want to set records and break records. And so our expectation is to have two great crowds in here," Alpert said.
Alpert doesn't have an exact number for how many people will be in attendance at Wallen's two-night stay but the expected number is 140,000 people. With record-breaking attendance expected, Alpert and the rest of the athletics team will be working on ensuring security, vending, traffic management, parking and more.
He said the logistics aren't too different from a typical football game.
"A lot of those things are just like a home football game. So we're going to manage those in coordination with our partners here on campus, our police force from the campus police, and then ultimately, the city and county," Alpert said.
The concerts are happening in the middle of football season, but Alpert said the dates worked out.
"It was really a luck of the draw from a scheduling perspective," Alpert said. "So when the SEC released our schedule this year, to play a road game and then have a bye week and another road game gave us 3.5-4 weeks to host something here and be prepared if we need to do anything to repair the field."
Alpert said he doesn't know how much revenue the concerts will bring in for the university, but he said making money isn't the goal.
"We want to have events in the stadium that bring notoriety to our campus, to our community. And I really believe adding these types of events is like adding an eighth and ninth home game. That really helps bring energy, tourism, to our city and our community — which is certainly a value to us being leaders at the university," Alpert said.
Concerts are just one way Alpert said he wants to create more use out of the stadium. Right now, it gets used only for home football games, and there are seven scheduled for this year. Alpert said since a recent $337 million renovation, he and his team are constantly looking for ways to generate revenue and bring exposure to Knoxville.