Lest there be any doubt, Minnesota United is in support of the 23-year-old undergraduate organizing an eight-hour electronic dance music festival outside Allianz Field.

The Forbidden Festival, scheduled for Sept. 21, is planning for some 4,000 attendees and promises an all-you-can-drink open bar with a wide variety of alcohol. Given that festival organizer Breno Bueno is still an undergraduate at the University of St. Thomas, some skeptics questioned whether the 21+ event has legs.

“So evidently the ‘Forbidden’ college festival that a 23-year-old St. Thomas student is promoting … is really a thing and not a joke,” wrote a longtime soccer fan on the social media platform X, noting Minnesota United promoted the event in a recent newsletter.

“We think it’s a unique event idea,” said Zacharia Litzelswope, director of events and guest experience for Minnesota United, in an interview this week. “We’ve been unfortunately slow to the game of getting into music, and a lot of that was due to COVID. We want to find the balance of introducing people to entertainment and being respectful of the neighbors.”

Litzelswope acknowledged that last month’s Breakaway Music Festival, which drew some 24,000 visitors over two days, had generated numerous noise complaints. The Forbidden Festival will have a “smaller footprint,” he said, with one stage instead of two. The stage will be situated just north of the Great Lawn, facing the stadium itself, which is likely to help contain sound. Breakaway, in contrast, offered music on two stages, he said, with speakers and event-goers “stretched all over the northeast side of the site.”

Bueno has asked the city for a slightly lower noise level variance than Breakaway, with a limit of 90 decibels instead of 97. As for the open bar, Litzelswope said “that’s an initiative of the event itself. Like any event, we make sure they have the proper permitting. … We have security standards, whether it’s inside the stadium or outside.”

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