How The Kallang team is gearing up to welcome BTS and Army back to the National Stadium

SINGAPORE – When BTS return to Singapore’s shores in December for four historic nights at the National Stadium, the seven members will walk into a venue that has been preparing for their return since they left it.

That was on Jan 19, 2019, when the boy band’s Love Yourself: Speak Yourself world tour made Singapore its only South-east Asian stop. The band sold out the National Stadium – the first K-pop act to do so – and the team at The Kallang has not forgotten about it.

“Having had the experience of hosting BTS in 2019 probably puts us in a better position than most venues,” says Mitch Seeto, 44, head of all venue operations at The Kallang. “Since then, we’ve done bigger shows all around. So I think it’s really exciting for us to welcome the BTS Army back.”

Scheduled for Dec 17, 19, 20 and 22, and with ticket sales starting from June 3, the shows are part of BTS’ Arirang world tour. It marks the septet’s longest tour stop in Asia outside South Korea and Japan, a milestone that came together from the partnership between event promoters Live Nation Singapore and The Kallang Group, the company that manages the venues in The Kallang.

They will be among the most operationally complex concerts ever staged at the precinct, and the team has done its homework.

Seeto and his colleagues have been studying footage of the group’s Goyang concerts in South Korea on April 9, 11 and 12, watching not as fans but as venue operations professionals observing the logistics and crowd management.

Singapore’s concert epicentre

Formerly known as the Singapore Sports Hub before its rebranding in November 2025, The Kallang encompasses several venues and spaces, including the 55,000-capacity National Stadium, the 12,000-capacity Singapore Indoor Stadium and the surrounding precinct. The two major venues, connected by open concourse space, are what make it uniquely suited to mega-shows of this scale – something no other venue in Singapore can replicate.

The precinct has become the default home for the world’s biggest touring acts who come to Singapore.

In 2024, both American pop star Taylor Swift and British rock band Coldplay staged six-night runs at the National Stadium, while American singer Bruno Mars played three nights there. American singer Lady Gaga made Singapore her exclusive Asia stop in 2025 with four nights at the same venue.

Each of those runs tested and ultimately refined the systems the team will deploy for BTS.

Seeto’s core team comprises three others who each manages a different part of The Kallang: Calvin Palyama, 52, leads operations at the National Stadium; Tat Siong Ng, 40, manages the Indoor Stadium; and Lih Long Lee, 38, is responsible for the precinct and outdoor spaces.

Seeto has been with the stadium’s team since the beginning. He is a Sydney native who worked the London 2012 Summer Olympics before arriving in Singapore 13 years ago, when the current National Stadium was still a construction site.

At the eye of the storm

For all the noise and spectacle outside, the atmosphere inside the operations control room during a major show is surprisingly quiet.

“It’s like the calm at the centre of a tornado,” Seeto says, “because everybody’s done the planning. All the work leads up to it, and everybody knows what’s going to happen on the day.”

“But when different incidents occur, or we need to respond, that’s really where the excitement is,” he adds. “Knowing what everybody’s role is and trusting the people on the ground, the people in that room, to execute the plans and roll with it.”

During Coldplay’s Jan 24 show in 2024, for instance, a storm started mid-concert, forcing the team to switch from dry- to wet-weather crowd management plans on the fly. It re-routed tens of thousands of fans to Stadium MRT station in the right sequence, safely and on time.

The team members say they train for such moments rigorously and do their due diligence. Before Swift’s six-night run in March 2024, some of the members flew to Melbourne, Australia, a month earlier to observe her shows there and understand what crowd behaviour to expect in Singapore.

Before Coldplay came to town, others went to Perth, Australia, in November 2023 for the same reason.

For BTS’ Arirang shows, which are expected to last for 2½ hours each, the team has already flagged one particular challenge: the 360-degree open stage with runway extensions, an innovative configuration that allows fans from every section to experience the performance from multiple perspectives.

Whether a similar set-up is feasible at the National Stadium remains to be seen, as the full production requirements have not yet been finalised.

Inspired by Seoul’s historic Gyeonghoeru Pavilion, the Arirang tour stage features rotating performance areas while the extended runways allow BTS members to get closer to fans throughout the stadium.

“We’ll see what the BTS set-up will be like when we get the details,” Palyama says. “We’ll work with them to see how that works in Singapore.”

The batch entry system

BTS’ 2019 show was the first time the team deployed what it now calls the batch entry system, a logistical solution unique to The Kallang that has since become standard practice for standing-floor K-pop concerts.

With 16,000 fans allocated to the stadium floor, simply opening the gates for entry was not an option.

“We divided those 16,000 into batches of 1,000,” Seeto explains. “Half of the 16,000 were held in the Indoor Stadium, in air-conditioning. BTS film content was playing on the screens and drinks were available. The other 8,000 were around the National Stadium promenade.”

Moving all 16,000 people into their floor positions took 90 minutes, with each batch following a flag-bearer in sequence. Gates for the seated sections opened only after all floor fans were in position.

“We got a lot of social media comments on how positive that was, having the fans wait in a nice, comfortable atmosphere,” Seeto recalls. “It was well-managed. It wasn’t a big rush of people running in, like what you might get at other venues around the world.”

The system has since been refined and expanded. For K-pop girl group Blackpink’s November 2025 shows at the National Stadium, the floor was divided into five separate standing pens, each requiring its own batch entry sequence, a more complex operation that involved extensive coordination across the entire precinct.

Refinements were made over the years to make the concert experience better for the fans, says Ng. “It’s all about safety and comfort. We ask ourselves, ‘How do we enhance that experience for them? How do we make them comfortable before the show?’”

“The more planning we put in, the more rehearsals we need, just to get the timing right before the actual thing happens,” he adds.

The personal touches

Some of The Kallang’s most effective touches are intimate, personalised ones.

At the Indoor Stadium, Ng has curated what he calls the Walk of Fame, a corridor leading to dressing rooms and the stage, lined with concert posters going back to the 1990s, many of them signed by the artistes themselves.

When an act return for a second or third visit, they walk past evidence of their own history there. “They remember, ‘Oh, I was here the last time,’” he says.

When K-pop boy band Ateez performed at the Indoor Stadium in February 2026, member Seonghwa posted an Instagram Story of a poster Ng had put up of their 2023 show at the same venue, and captioned it “3 years ago”.

“That’s what we want,” Ng says. “We want to reignite that memory.”

Then there are the now-famous singalongs by attendees leaving the concerts at The Kallang.

What started as a practical measure – Lee holding his phone up to a microphone to play Coldplay songs for fans exiting the National Stadium and queueing to enter Stadium MRT station after the 2024 concerts – has evolved into one of The Kallang’s signature post-show experiences.

Lee, whose nickname is DJ LL, recalls: “The atmosphere became lighter. People started singing together. It was very surprising.”

The system has since expanded well beyond music. When K-pop boy band Seventeen played the National Stadium in March, dancers from local crew Double R. Squad performed alongside the singalong at two outdoor stages as fans streamed out, turning the post-concert exit into an extension of the Seventeen concert.

Playlists are now tailored for each artiste, with Lee’s team – many of them fans themselves – doing the research.

“They are very enthusiastic about it because they get a chance to play songs that they can relate to as fans,” he says. “So they will also be dancing along.”

The challenge gets particularly creative when two shows end at the same time.

In November 2025, Blackpink performed at the National Stadium on the same night as Hong Kong Heavenly King Jacky Cheung’s Indoor Stadium show, with both crowds streaming out in close succession.

“One minute they’re playing a Blackpink song,” Seeto says, “and the next they have to switch to Jacky Cheung.”

More than logistics

Beyond operational systems, Seeto says the team’s mission is about being part of something larger.

“We understand that these events are moments that people have waited for their whole lives,” he says. “We’re playing a part in building that memory for them. Whatever we can do to really make it a great occasion for them, something they really treasure, we value that as well.”

That philosophy sometimes extends to practical acts of care. Staff regularly monitor fans on the National Stadium or Indoor Stadium floor who have been queueing from morning until evening and may be dehydrated. When someone looks unwell, the team steps in, bringing water and, if necessary, guiding him or her out of the crowd for a breather.

“They’ve spent the whole day at the venue,” Seeto says. “Safety comes first, and we make sure they’re looked after.”

For Ng, it is at that moment when a fan stops being a number in a crowd and becomes a person. At Chinese singer Joker Xue’s Indoor Stadium concert in 2024, amid the chaos of fans rushing towards the stage, his team spotted a pregnant woman in the front row who had no idea the artiste was about to come down from the stage to interact with fans.

“We told her, ‘Please don’t move. We will look after you,’” he says. “Everyone around her ran. She just stayed put, and she was fine.”

Seeto puts it simply: “It’s not all just about the science of action. What’s the feeling like? What’s the atmosphere like down on the floor? That’s the intangibles of what we do.”

Book it/BTS World Tour Arirang In Singapore

Where: National Stadium, 1 Stadium Drive
When: Dec 17, 19, 20 and 22, 7pm
Admission: Tickets from $148 to $388 will be sold from June 5 at noon via Ticketmaster (go to ticketmaster.sg or call 6018-7645) and will also be available on Klook (go to str.sg/fSRA). The Army Membership Pre-sale is from June 3, noon to 10pm, while the Live Nation pre-sale is from June 4, noon to 10pm