With the 2018 NFL season kicking off on Thursday, fans will be greeted with new ways to watch games, consume content and place bets on individual players and teams.
The league is expected to make strides with how it collects and utilizes data, sells tickets, and streams content. Perhaps most noteworthy, however, will be how the NFL embraces sports betting, which represents a completely new area of business this season.
Sports Betting
States such as New Jersey, Delaware and Mississippi are beginning to adopt a regulatory framework for sports betting. That means the 2018 NFL season will be the first in which sportsbooks outside of Nevada have direct ties to the league, some even operating from inside stadiums during games.
Last month, DraftKings launched a mobile sportsbook in New Jersey during a Browns-Giants preseason game at Metlife Stadium, marking the first NFL game in which fans could place bets from inside a professional football stadium. In Atlantic City, MGM Resorts now also offers a mobile sports betting option through its Borgata casino and the Android app PlayMGM. Casinos can now also advertise with NFL teams.
The sports betting landscape is still in its infancy, with the U.S Supreme Court only striking down PASPA, the federal law that prohibited sports gambling, in April. Leagues will need to work with sports bookers and data/media companies to find ways to generate additional revenue as this market evolves.
According to a recent Nielsen Sports report commissioned by the American Gaming Association, the NFL could see its revenue increased by as much as $2.3 billion a year if it were to leverage the betting opportunity well. The gains would mostly stem from increased viewership, which would buoy ticket sales, as well as spending from betting stakeholders on advertising, media, data, and sponsorships.
Data Expands League-Wide
Heading into its fifth season with the NFL, Zebra Technologies will continue to provide its 0.1 oz., nickel-sized chips that track in-game player and ball movements on the field. Starting this year, however, the NFL will begin to disseminate that data more widely.
While teams were previously given redacted datasets about player movements (usually receiving one-sided information about their players without being able to see the movements of their competitors), that will begin to change this season. All teams will now receive global league-wide tracking data sets for the 2016 and 2017 seasons as well as weekly updates through the 2018 season. That could will help to unlock new analytic capabilities that might change the way teams think about strategy.
Wearables
The 2018 season will mark the second straight season in which players are outfitted with Whoop 2.0 wearable devices by their union. The devices allow them to measure and analyze biometrics such as sleep, strain, and recovery. The NFL Players Association was the first players association in professional sports to partner with a wearable technology company. In 2017 it scooped up a stake in Whoop through its athlete-driven accelerator, OneTeam Collective.
In this new era of personalized tracking, leagues from the NFL to the NBA and MLB are trying to figure out how to best navigate the world of personalized health and performance data. Though the NFL’s CBA is not set to expire until 2020, the Whoop deal could set the tone for the next wave of negotiations between the league and NFLPA, especially as sports gambling puts pressure on data collection.
Under the NFLPA’s terms with Whoop, NFL players maintain ownership of their health data, but also may be able to commercialize that data through the NFLPA’s licensing program. Sean Sansiveri, the NFLPA’s vice president of business and legal affairs, said the union has planted a flag to get ahead of the curve, and plans to help athletes make money off their own data if they choose to do so.
Smarter Fantasy
Increased access to data and improved cloud-based technologies are leading to the development of more sophisticated fantasy sports services. Last month, San Francisco 49ers cornerback Richard Sherman announced that he was launching a daily fantasy sports site called Daily Number that will give fans the ability to craft their own lineups using any combination of players. Also this season, NBC Sports is launching a new kit on Rotoworld that will enable fantasy players from FanDuel, Yahoo!, and DraftKings to simulate up to 150 lineups, based on player projections, team statistics, and news.
Streaming
The NFL is drastically expanding its reach through streaming technologies this season. While Verizon for years had the exclusive rights to stream NFL games on smartphones, the NFL has been working since last season to ensure that fans can stream games to their mobile devices no matter which carrier they use. In 2018, anyone with a smartphone will be able to watch games.
All in-market games will be available to watch live in the NFL or Yahoo Sports apps, without needing to authenticate a cable subscription. The NFL said this approach could quadruple the number of devices with access compared to last season. (In 2017, the league suffered a decline in ratings.) The approach also from strategies used elsewhere that tend to only enable streaming for out-of-market games.
The NFL also renewed its Thursday Night Football deal with Amazon’s Prime Video and partnered with Snapchat on content creation. CBS, meanwhile, plans to stream the Super Bowl for free.
Ticketing
The 2018 season will mark the first full season since the NFL expanded its partnership with Ticketmaster in an attempt to control more secondary-market sales. When the NFL first announced that expanded partnership in October, it described the deal as one that would increase safety and reduce ticket fraud. While that may be true, mobile and digital ticketing also provides teams important data about the people who attend their games, which they can use to tweak products, services, and promotions.
A number of teams have been experimenting with mobile-first ticketing programs and many have announced secondary-market partnerships with the league via Ticketmaster over the past 11 months. The New England Patriots, for example, launched a secondary ticket exchange in partnership with Ticketmaster for the 2018 season that allows fans to securely buy and sell tickets through Patriots.com.
Key to these deals is the NFL’s use of Ticketmaster venue software called Presence, which represents a move to a paperless, digital ticketing system that will make it easier for fans and teams to adapt to mobile-first ticketing systems.
Concussions
The NFL continues to promote safety efforts to reduce head injuries, including putting new rules in place to try to mitigate impacts. The 2018 season will mark the first season in which the league’s new helmet rule will be implemented. A player who lowers his head when initiating contact with the helmet of an opponent will be penalized.
The helmet rule comes as the league continues to crowdsource new technologies in an attempt to reduce on-field head trauma. Earlier this summer, the league hosted its latest HeadHealthTech Challenge to identify the most innovative products from companies attempting to reduce the rate of concussion. The league continues to search for technologies that will help to protect players from head injury, rewarding winners large sums of money to accelerate their research and development. Applications for next year’s HeadHealthTech challenge will remain open through Sept. 13.