And the mystery artists bringing a ‘major’ concert to Bank of America Stadium in 2025 are...

Following more than 48 hours of keeping Charlotte music fans guessing, Live Nation and Tepper Sports Entertainment on Thursday morning revealed their well-kept secret: Billy Joel and Sting are the mystery artists bringing a tour to Bank of America Stadium next year.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Famers will perform here on Saturday, May 10, a date that currently is the only one they have planned for the Southeast in 2025.

Tickets go on sale at 9 a.m. Friday, Oct. 4, at LiveNation.com.

For Joel, who turns 76 next May, it will be his second time playing the stadium in just over three years, having taken fans on “an exhilarating ride” here in April 2022. Sting, however, hasn’t performed in Charlotte since November 2007, when he headlined then-Charlotte Bobcats Arena (now Spectrum Center) with his band The Police. He turns 73 next Wednesday.

Billed as “Billy Joel & Sting: One Night — One Stage,” it’s a safe bet the setlists will include songs like “Every Breath You Take,” “Roxanne” and “Fragile” from Sting, and selections like “Piano Man,” “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant” and “Only the Good Die Young” from Joel.

Joel and Sting, of course, weren’t actually in attendance for what the organizations had hyped in a Tuesday-morning email as the addition of “another major show to the 2025 concert series.”

The most recognizable name at Thursday’s event was Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles, who officially made the announcement (and noted, during her brief address: “I think I got married to a Billy Joel song.”)

Still, it was an extraordinary attempt at showmanship for both the concert promoter and the Carolina Panthers. A fancy ceremony is highly unusual for this type of announcement, even one involving Charlotte’s largest outdoor venue, even one centering around a major live-music draw. In fact, the last to get the royal treatment was also Joel — also in absentia — at a similar news conference in September 2019 to announce a 2020 show (one that wound up getting postponed for two years due to Covid).

In the five years since, no other artist has been made the star of an in-person announcement for a BofA concert.

The Rolling Stones’ and Elton John’s performances in 2021 and 2022, respectively, each were teased with logos cast onto the stadium videoboards ahead of their reveals; but in both cases the official news ultimately was handled via email. Even Beyoncé, last year, simply got a press release.

As such, given the baked-right-in hype, there was a fair amount of wild speculation Tuesday and Wednesday, with armchair pundits making guesses that included stadium-friendly artists like AC/DC, Paul McCartney, U2, Bruce Springsteen, Lady Gaga and Oasis. Taylor Swift’s name was tossed around, too, but then quickly tossed out — due to her disqualifying relationships with Live Nation rivals AEG Presents and The Messina Group.

The Panthers have had a partnership with Live Nation since 2020. (Swift has said her blockbuster “Eras Tour” will end in December.)

Live Nation also had similar events scheduled for later on Thursday morning at big venues in other U.S. cities, including Syracuse, N.Y., and Salt Lake City, Utah.

For Charlotte, Joel’s and Sting’s show was the second announced for the stadium in the past week; last Thursday, the hard-rock band Metallica confirmed that its “M72 World Tour” would make a stop at BofA on Saturday, May 31.

More immediately, next month, country-music star Morgan Wallen will play makeup shows on Oct. 18 and 19. He called out sick in July.

And during Thursday morning’s news conference to tout Joel and Sting, Caroline Wright of Tepper Sports Entertainment teased that “a few more” concerts would be announced “in the coming weeks.”

Major shows at the stadium in Charlotte have indeed become fairly commonplace.

But it wasn’t always this way. For the first 25 years after the Panthers were founded in 1995, the stadium was very rarely — nearly never, in fact — used for concerts. Until Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones finally, officially, put BofA back into the concert business in 2021 with a marathon Covid-era show, there’d been just two in stadium history prior: Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw in 2012 and a much-younger set of Stones in 1997.

The most active year for the stadium concert-wise was 2022, when the Panthers welcomed Billy Joel, Chesney, Def Leppard, Mötley Crüe, Garth Brooks, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Elton John.

This “commitment to bringing the greatest stadium shows to Charlotte,” Center City Partners president Michael Smith said at the news conference Thursday, “is playing a dramatic role in uptown vibrancy, in the maturation of our city as a destination.”

Smith said two of the top three days in 2024 so far for visitors to the Queen City were a direct result of stadium concerts featuring Chesney (on April 27) and George Strait (on June 1). In 2023, he said, the top two days of the year were thanks to Luke Combs, who played two shows that July, and Beyoncé, who Smith said attracted 191,000 visitors that August.

Worth noting: Citi cardmembers will have access to Billy Joel-Sting presale tickets from 10 a.m. Monday until 10 p.m. next Thursday (Oct. 3). For details, visit www.citientertainment.com.