Somewhere on a credenza in the upstairs offices of Crypto.com Arena, a timeworn fan of old ticket stubs tells Katie Pandolfo’s story.

Downtown-based sports and entertainment giant AEG recently named Pandolfo general manager of the company’s iconic downtown venue, where she sits leafing through the stack. “The Grateful Dead, Lollapalooza ’92, Pink Floyd,” Pandolfo said. “I have always saved tickets. To me, when I look at these, I see my life.”

Pandolfo has wanted to run live events since she cut class as a high school senior in Chicago to catch a St. Patrick’s Day parade. Now, she runs one of the world’s busiest and most recognizable sports and entertainment venues – home to the Los Angeles Lakers, Kings and Sparks – along with a workforce of more than 1,000 employees who keep the 20,000-seat arena running for about 200 concerts and sports broadcasts a year.

She comes to the role with 25 years in live entertainment, most recently as general manager of Dignity Health Sports Park in Carson, where she welcomed more than 25 million guests across thousands of events, from MLS Cups and NFL seasons to Olympic and World Cup qualifiers. Her appointment makes her one of the few executives in sports with hands-on experience across every major league – MLB, NFL, MLS, NHL and the NBA.

Pandolfo took the helm at Crypto.com Arena this past summer. Her on-the-job training  six back-to-back Sabrina Carpenter concerts slated for November, sprinkled with Lakers and Kings home games in a week’s span. Also on her summer concert schedule was one of the legendary rap group Wu-Tang Clan’s final touring performances in June.

While she’s keeping that machine humming, she and her team are preparing for a deluge of global marquee events – including the Grammy Awards, the NCAA Regionals and the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games – all while keeping an eye on shifting consumer habits, an increasingly crowded venue landscape and a downtown recovery still struggling to find its footing.

“I look at all of these challenges as catalysts for growth,” Pandolfo said. “How do I bring all of that together, along with L.A. Live and Peacock Theatre, to make this a place where the entire city wants to gather? I believe we are on the precipice of truly becoming a city center.”

The top choice

AEG President and Chief Executive Dan Beckerman said Pandolfo’s appointment as general manager of Crypto.com Arena was years in the making.

“Several years ago, I sat down with her and said, ‘I don’t know when this role will become available, but when it does, would you consider it?’” he said. “It became clear she was interested, and when the opportunity came, it was a big step but a natural one for her.”

Beckerman described Pandolfo’s rise through AEG as “pretty amazing.” She joined more than two decades ago – “stolen from baseball,” as he put it – and worked her way up from event manager to one of the company’s top operations executives, competing with interest from all over the world for the position.

He called her a “proven, hands-on, roll-up-her-sleeves leader,” who invests in the people under her, adding that her persistence and dedication made her the clear choice. Pandolfo succeeds industry veteran Lee Zeidman, who stayed on as an adviser to aid in the transition.

“She’s following a legend, but Katie has her own style,” Beckerman said. “It was her consistency, work ethic and stamina. Crypto.com Arena is a big task, but Katie has the passion and the will to rise to that challenge.”

Filling the Clippers’ void

The first of many challenges for Pandolfo will be filling the void after the arena lost a major tenant last year, when the Los Angeles Clippers moved to their new home court at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood.

Though “obviously not ideal” from a business standpoint, she said the shift also opens valuable flexibility for scheduling and operations. The venue still sees 4 million guests a year, and Lakers games average around 19,000 ticket sales at the 20,000-seat stadium, with 71% of games selling out.

“With the Clippers leaving, the first opportunities are for the Kings and the Lakers and even some of our concerts to have more flexibility on dates,” Pandolfo said. “There’s a big difference between a Kings game on a Monday night and one on a Saturday night, and before we had to split those between three primary tenants.”

That change, she explained, means better weekend scheduling, stronger attendance and improved fan experience. While she acknowledged that “nobody wants to lose business,” Pandolfo is quick to focus on how to fill those freed-up dates.

“There are people that want to play this building that we didn’t have the dates for,” she said, pointing to the quick booking of two spring Ariana Grande shows as an early example.

The goal now, she added, is to keep the building busy through creative programming that activates the entire L.A. Live campus year-round.

“So, it does give us a little bit more flexibility that we welcome, and it also forces us to be more creative to fill more of these dates with original content,” she said.

A crowded market

When the arena opened its doors in 1999, it was one of the largest and most advanced sports and entertainment arenas in the country. Then known as the Staples Center, the venue was built for $375 million on the 4-million-square-foot L.A. Live campus as a way to revitalize the downtown area.

Since then, a dozen venues have cropped up throughout the city as direct competitors. The regional market is as dense as it’s ever been, with SoFi Stadium, Intuit Dome, Kia Forum and BMO Stadium all vying for events.

For Pandolfo’s team, the challenge isn’t a scarcity of events – it’s optimizing a schedule that rarely goes dark and modernizing Crypto and L.A. Live to meet the moment.

Running a 25-year-old venue in Los Angeles also means thinking like an asset manager. The arena is midway through a multiyear revamp, bringing upgraded suites, digital wayfinding and energy-efficient systems to help it compete.

Nationally, 70% of stadiums and arenas are investing in sustainability retrofits, according to “The State of Stadiums in the United States” report. AEG is positioning the arena as a flagship for renewable energy sourcing and waste-reduction goals.

Technology is the other arms race. Pandolfo’s team is testing or has already implemented improvements aimed at keeping the experience seamless. That includes contactless concessions, offered through Amazon.com Inc.’s “Just Walk Out” service. The feature was a standout when the Intuit Dome debuted in 2024, and its arrival here signals healthy competition among L.A. venues.

Crypto also provides reusable concessions containers and an AI-driven security screening checkpoint that differentiates between potential threats and most everyday metal items such as cellphones and keys.

“They just walk right through, which means they get in very fast, and it’s a much better experience for them when you get into the venue,” she said. “Along with converting some of our concessions systems to Amazon, these changes get fans to their seats faster and are just a tremendous value to both the guest and to the business.”

The live event boom

Even as Los Angeles’ venue market grows more crowded, Beckerman said the post-pandemic surge in consumer demand for live experiences is more than offsetting the pressure.

“That trend has been feeding our entire industry for the last 10 years,” he said. “There has been this seismic shift away from things to experiences.”

Beckerman also credits the company’s vertically integrated model for keeping the arena’s calendar full – particularly its in-house promoter, AEG Presents, the world’s second-largest presenter of live music and entertainment events.

“I can’t help but notice that we’ve had four concerts this week, and three of them were promoted by AEG Presents,” Beckerman said. “We had Benson Boone last night, two sold-out shows over the weekend with the artist Levi, and in November we have six sold-out Sabrina Carpenter shows – all promoted by AEG Presents.”

With AEG Presents headquartered just a block away from the arena, Crypto.com benefits from a built-in pipeline of top-tier tours and emerging talent.

“When you look at the demand for live events, the appetite that fans have right now is incredible,” Beckerman said. “You have new artists almost from out of nowhere selling out arenas. That speaks to the strength and health of the live music business, and it bodes very well for Crypto.com Arena.”

Kathryn Schloessman, president and chief executive of the Los Angeles Sports & Entertainment Commission, agreed. One of the minds behind Super Bowl LVI, FIFA World Cup 2026 and the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games, her view of Crypto.com Arena’s role is more ecosystemic than competitive.

“Yes, it’s more competitive now with Intuit and other new venues opening, but there’s also so much more business,” she said. “We’ve seen a huge rise in experiential spending. There’s just far more opportunity than ever before, and we in L.A. are uniquely positioned to capture it.”

A 2024 study by the Los Angeles Sports Council pegged L.A.’s sports industry output at $11.7 billion (up 31% from 2022), supporting 83,880 jobs and nearly $9 billion in labor income. To Schloessman, it’s the city’s booming network of sports venues that has positioned Crypto.com Arena as a destination for the Olympic Games.

Scaling for the Olympics and beyond

The clock is already ticking. In 2028, the arena is expected to host boxing and gymnastics.

Across the city, planners are projecting tens of billions in regional economic activity from 2026 through 2028 events, including the FIFA World Cup, NCAA Regionals and the Super Bowl. Schloessman calls the period “a once-in-a-lifetime lineup,” noting that no other metro area in the world will host so many overlapping global showcases.

“Everything scales up,” Pandolfo said. “Security, ticketing, media (and) transport. It has to be perfect.”

Beckerman said Pandolfo’s past work on global soccer tournaments makes her “no stranger to international events.” And since Dignity Health is also a designated venue for the Games, she’s well acquainted with the LA28 Organizing Committee.

“I had a huge head start, and I knew all of the players at LA28, and I knew their expectations,” she said. “So, when I moved down here, it wasn’t as big of a learning curve.”

Downtown crossroads

The venue has always been intertwined with downtown’s fortunes.

When it was first conceived, the Los Angeles Times called it the “most complicated sports arena deal in the country.” Back then, AEG agreed to numerous concessions with the city of Los Angeles and community groups to ensure the venue and surrounding L.A. Live campus would be funded privately and not subsidized by tax dollars. Developers committed to affordable housing, local hiring and financing open spaces and parking initiatives.

For civic leaders, the deal was an opportunity to turn downtown into an entertainment hub, speculating that it would attract suburbanites to move to the city core.

“Civic leaders are rapturous over the possibility that the pieces are falling into place at last, and that the new arena will prove the catalyst,” the Times wrote at the time.

Today, post-pandemic data paint a mixed picture for the region: office vacancies near 30%, amplified street-level disorder, a hospitality sector still below pre-2020 levels. And the shadow of the city’s famous graffiti towers hangs over the arena like an abandoned dream. The three building, 49-story Oceanwide Plaza complex was slated to introduce more than 1,000 housing units to the area before it was famously deserted by Beijing developer Oceanwide Holdings and later reclaimed by street artists in one of the world’s biggest-ever spectacles of vandalism.

Still, the neighborhood is showing signs of a turnaround in both small business and housing. Roughly 2,600 new residential units are under construction, according to city data, and rents are beginning to stabilize. At the same time, a wave of new restaurants is drawing locals back, helping the area emerge as a dining destination.

Pandolfo sees Crypto.com Arena as a driver for such economic change, noting that she’s taken stock of the good signs since starting work in the area. She said the neighborhood’s transformation is clear, with new restaurants, small businesses, housing developments and coffee shops opening, and a major convention center renovation underway.

Asked about her long-term vision for Crypto.com Arena and L.A. Live, she said it was to become a city center that drives positive change for the neighborhood.

“Los Angeles is a different place than it was when this arena was built in 1999,” she said. “How do we take downtown, which is an iconic location, and continue to make it a place that brings people joy? Downtown is undergoing a massive resurgence. I can feel it. It’s going to take time, but I’m looking forward to that journey.”

For Pandolfo, the job is as much about logistics as legacy. As Los Angeles readies for its next global spotlight, she’s focused on keeping Crypto.com Arena not just busy, but essential.

“This is one of the most iconic buildings in the entire world. Some of the greatest events, the greatest performances, greatest athletes have walked through the doors of this arena,” she said. “To have the chance to come in and manage this venue into the future is such a fantastic opportunity.”