Four months after the announcement of the “BTS World Tour: Love Yourself”, where a four-legged, 32 event tour was announced, a finale to the North American part of the tour was announced. News broke Wednesday that Citi Field would play host to the final American part of the tour, the venue being the grandest out of all of their Western stops. Citi Field primarily hosts the New York Mets baseball team and has the ability to seat around 45,000 people. Except for Oakland and Amsterdam, Citi Field will be the only stop that hosts only one night.
BTS Finish Their North American Tour Leg In Dramatic Style, Performing At Their Biggest US Venue To Date
The Music That Fuels The Tour
The tour kicks off on the 25th, just over three months after the release of the group’s third Korean studio album Love Yourself: Tear. The album reached #1 on the Billboard 200, the sites top album leaderboard. The biggest track on the release was “Fake Love,” which reached 10th on the US Billboard Hot 100 and #1 on the US World Digital Singles chart. The song also won 12 Korean Music Show wins over the course of three weeks.
The song was heavily promoted in Western programming with the group doing a media tour. Along with a daytime TV performance on the Ellen DeGeneres Show and a late night TV performance on The Late Late Show with James Corden, the group received a lot of press from being one of the headline acts of the 2018 Billboard Music Awards.
The Start Of The Tour
The group’s home country, South Korea, kicks off the tour with two nights at the Seoul Olympic Stadium. Both nights have already sold out. After that BTS, goes to North America for 15 events at seven venues. Four of those nights take place in the famed Staples Center, which hosts the Lakers (NBA), Clippers (NBA) and Kings (NHL).
In a one-off, the group heads to Oakland on September 12th to play at the Oracle Arena. For the rest of September, the venues and areas that host BTS concerts are smaller cities, attracting bigger nearby crowds. For example, Hamilton, Ontario’s FirstOntario Center hosts three nights, with the majority of the crowd presumably coming from Toronto. It’s a similar situation for the Newark, NJ and Fort Worth, TX concerts as well. Although, Newark isn’t a new location for the group, as they played at the Prudential Center two times during their last tour.
Europe And Japan Finale Of Tour
Europe gets much fewer concerts than Asia or North America but is still given events in many landmark places. London, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Paris all get many nights. Finally, the last three months of the tour are spent in the secondary market for the group, Japan. Four venues, including the worldwide popular Tokyo Dome, share 9 concerts. All places are baseball-sized in terms of seating. During 2017’s “BTS Live Trilogy Episode III: The Wings Tour” (a long name, I know) Japan was given 15 concerts.
A Poetic Return To The Big Apple
The seven Bangtan Boys have come a long way since their 2015 tour which included 22 dates and only racked up a reported 80,000 in combined attendance (albeit some events did not report a number). It will be a bittersweet moment for the group when they return to New York City for their Citi Field performance, three years after performing in an under 3,000 capacity Best Buy Theatre.