The stadium experience

Get the basics right

Fans—whether they are young or old, fanatics or casual fans, football fans or fútbol fans—have a “core four” set of expectations when they arrive at the stadium, complemented by a set of other basic needs. Success across these attributes is a necessary prerequisite for establishing a base of engaged and satisfied fans that repeatedly attend games in-stadium instead of watching games from the comfort of their own homes.

The core four

Fan’s core four expectations are:

• They expect the stadium to be safe, comfortable, and clean.
• They want the view from their seats to match their expectations.
  
• They desire a high-quality game.
  
• They expect an exciting atmosphere within the stadium.
  

While these four attributes are unsurprising leaders in fan importance, what is striking is the extent to which they outpace other elements. On average, our survey showed they are more than 50 percent important than the next closest aspect of the stadium experience. The good news for teams is that fans are relatively satisfied with these core four experience elements—they are four of the only five attributes in the study that achieved more than 75 percent satisfaction at the aggregate level (figure 1).

While the core four have the highest satisfaction level we found, teams and leagues still have significant opportunity to increase satisfaction on these attributes through continued development and focus.

Figure 1. The relative importance/satisfaction with the core four

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While the core four attributes remain the most important attributes across all sports, fan types, and age groups, casual fans place relatively higher importance on these attributes. For casual fans, our survey shows that the core four are 75 percent more important than the next closest attribute. And yet satisfaction for this group is lower across the board, showing that teams have work to do to push casual fans to the higher attendance and spend levels seen in the fanatic group.

Notably, the gap shrinks to a mere 31 percent for fanatics. This suggests that some of the smaller, more nuanced elements of the stadium experience stand out to the fanatic more than the typical fan (figure 2).

Figure 2. Fanatics vs. casual comparison

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As fans are considering their desired experience, each of these elements carries significant weight, though both importance and satisfaction among fans is considerably lower (figure 3).

Figure 3. Satisfaction and importance across the core four and rest of the basics

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Of particular note among the remaining basics are concessions, a favorite for fan complaints, and the source of some of the lowest satisfaction scores in the data set. Sports have historically seen high concession prices at stadiums, though there are several examples that challenge this norm, both in and out of industry.

For example, Amazon Prime challenged the concept of high unit prices and shipping costs, but has seen sustained revenue growth. Amazon’s solution in retail, and some early examples in sports—the Atlanta Falcon’s reduced concession prices, for one—suggest that improvements to satisfaction across the basics can drive incremental revenue and margin.

Despite their high relative importance to fans, the basics are just that—the table stakes that set the foundation for the stadium experience. As the Falcons example shows, there are still ways to improve the basics and increase both fan revenue and satisfaction simultaneously. However, in and of themselves the basics are just that—basics. They are necessary, though not sufficient on their own to create a cohesive fan experience that will consistently win out over the out-of-stadium opportunities, and draw fans to purchase tickets and attend games in person.

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Today’s playing field

Once stadiums have enticed a fan to come to a game, it is important to go beyond the basics, delivering a fan experience that will keep today’s fans returning to the stadium, as well as spending their time and money in other associated channels. The next level of experiential elements—the playing field that stadiums compete on today—includes:

• Personal identification with the team
• The ability to have experiences that are unique to the stadium
  
• Experiences that match their personal interests
• Live entertainment options before, during, and after the game, and
  
• The opportunity to sit with fans who share their interests
  

Out of these elements, our research shows that fan identification with "their" team stands out as the most important. This does not, though, hold true for all fans equally. For example, fans in the Boomer generation, who grew up pre-Internet in an era of lower mobility, place higher relative importance on identifying with their team. Their millennial counterparts, however, place approximately 30 percent less value on this metric. This gap is particularly pronounced among both casual fans and boomer fans.

The implication here is that stadiums must consider the future generation in today’s experience, adjusting to a changing, younger fan base, buoyed by millennials who have a 7 percent higher likelihood than boomers of being fanatics, that places relative importance on a different set of experiential attributes—the ability to have unique experiences within the stadium; having experiences that match their personal interests; live entertainment options before, during, and after the game; and the opportunity to sit with other fans who share their interests—while maintaining loyalty amongst the older generation.

On aggregate, the attributes that make up today’s playing field of the stadium experience are emerging in importance, but lagging in satisfaction, providing a key opening for innovation.

Our research clearly finds that current efforts to deliver on these experiential elements are not sufficient to satisfy fans. On average, satisfaction across these elements is approximately 55 percent.

However, increasing the satisfaction score across these elements may not be as simple as bringing in bigger entertainment names, doing more interesting giveaways, or setting up specialized fanatic sections in the stadium. Rather, what stands out about these attributes is the focus on personalization, and truly knowing and understanding the individual fans in their stadiums as well as their specific interests (figure 4).

Figure 4. Satisfaction and importance across playing field of today

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Given the relative importance and dissatisfaction with these experiential attributes, particularly for younger, next-gen fans, teams should prioritize building a robust understanding of their fan’s behaviors, creating a single view of the customer that can be leveraged to deliver personalized entertainment options as well as mechanisms to foster in-stadium communities of fans. Furthermore, teams must look to communicate these options in a cohesive and coherent way that speaks to each fan as an individual, emphasizing the true personalization of the experience and offer that is being presented to them as part of their time in the stadium.

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Innovate on differentiators

With the high importance for basic, personalized, unique entertainment, and a desire to identify with the team the fan is watching, there are several attributes such as mobile use and apps, Wi-Fi access, and personalized attention from staff members that are conspicuous for their absence from the lists of highly important attributes covered thus far.

Notably, attributes related to mobile use in stadium—for other forms of entertainment, fantasy, and in-game statistics, among other uses—as well as knowing and being able to act upon fan preferences were consistently placed at the bottom of the importance list. This remains true even among the millennial fan base. At the same time, satisfaction across these attributes was among the lowest found in the survey—averaging approximately 40 percent (figure 5).

Figure 5. Importance and satisfaction across differentiators

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Instead of throwing out these attributes as unimportant to the fan experience, and therefore not worthy of investment or focus, this combination of low importance ratings and low satisfaction suggests that the mobile experience has not yet been properly developed. It provides an area where teams innovate and differentiate their experience, creating the basis for engaging fans and encouraging them to continue coming to the stadium for years to come.

Teams and leagues have the opportunity to innovate for a fan base that may not yet know exactly what they want to receive, and helping occupy the significant downtime between plays, during timeouts, and between periods that exist in stadiums across sports can add value to time that might seem unused otherwise.

Additionally, there is significant room for innovation to elevate the connected, mobile experience to link fans, helping them with some of the “basics,” as well as introducing new, unique experiences captured in today’s differentiating attributes that they care most about. These innovations could include areas such as connecting fans to others that share their passions, tapping into the important attributes covered as the playing field of today by providing access to the unique activities and entertainment options that match their personal experiences, and providing access to unique in-stadium experiences.

The key for each of these innovation areas will remain to integrate seamlessly with the rest of the stadium experience without encroaching on the excitement of the stadium atmosphere.

To incorporate these differentiators, teams have developed seating sections for specific groups of fans, AR/VR experiences within the stadium, improved wireless access, customized mobile content, and competitions for fans in the stadium.

While all of these individually are likely to raise fan satisfaction levels marginally, real improvements can be made through the creation of an integrated platform across the unique experience elements. This would further the integration of mobile to develop and foster social fan connections and communities within the stadium while enabling teams to learn key details about individual fans and their preferences. Such learnings permit teams to direct fans to experiences they will identify within the moment.

Moving forward, these innovations will be critical to the continued success and viability of the in-stadium experience as out-of-stadium competition grows stronger, and as the younger fans that are growing into increasingly large percentages of sports fans over the coming years identify less and less with the individual team that they come to the stadium to watch.

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