INGLEWOOD, Calif. — When a team of world-class architects sat down to design SoFi Stadium, the $5 billion palace that will host Friday’s U.S. World Cup opener, they set a goal that might make soccer purists squirm.They and Stan Kroenke, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Rams (along with Premier League champion Arsenal and MLS’s Colorado Rapids, among other sports franchises), didn’t simply want a stage for Super Bowls and Olympics. They didn’t just want the most magnificent stadium in the National Football League.They wanted “something different,” a building with “personality,” one that would co-star with concerts and matches, one that would “be an equal participant to the entertainment,” lead architect Lance Evans tells The Athletic.He and his colleagues asked themselves: “Can we deliver awe just like (Lionel) Messi can deliver awe?”In other words, they designed the antithesis of soccer’s century-old cathedrals, where the game is the only attraction. Where it’s religion. Where it’s everything.SoFi, the world’s most expensive stadium, and several other NFL venues-turned-World Cup grounds, will wow visitors over the coming month because they’re exactly the opposite.In the first of 78 stateside World Cup matches on Friday, the U.S. men’s national team will welcome Paraguay to this spaceship-like structure south of Los Angeles. Players will arrive and descend 100 feet below terrain. When they emerge from gleaming locker rooms onto the field, walking past opulent field-side suites, they’ll stare up at a 2.2 million-pound, 70,000 square-foot, 80 million-pixel “Infinity Screen,” a double-sided 4K videoboard that’s the largest in all of sports.It will grab their attention — and yours. Via 260 embedded speakers, it will pump music and noise into your ears. It hangs from a translucent canopy that covers all 70,000 seats, plus a theatre and multi-acre plaza that “expands the notion of what a stadium is,” as Evans says.