Having a fully networked stadium has progressed from a dream to a luxury to a necessity in short order. Nearly every major league stadium is undergoing a wireless infrastructure upgrade; and new stadiums are being built with the network as much of a consideration as sight-lines and locker rooms. Where teams once hired network contractors to provide a service, now the NFL has an Official Wi-Fi Analytics Provider, making it a reasonable assumption that the other major leagues are soon to follow.
Much of the conversation about connecting fans to the stadium has revolved around “how:” what capabilities are needed, what hardware needs to be in place, how many screens and sensors and in what locations. When we look at the data and services provided by this infrastructure, we find that many of them revolve around the fans’ event experience: smoother entrance and egress, ordering concessions and purchasing merchandise from your seat, finding the restroom with the shortest line.
While these are important aspects of a fan’s experience, they are not unique to the sports experience. Spectators attending a concert, circus or festival will encounter many of the same issues, and yet these event industries are not fighting to reclaim in-person fans from the at-home experience.
Wearable technology on the athletes, combined with venues’ analytical and networking power, offers sports properties a way to create an experience exclusive to in-person fans, drawing new connections between the venue’s stakeholders.
While this integration can help major league sports retain or reclaim in-stadium fans, its real value may be as a lifeline for a sport like track & field, which has fallen decades behind the broader sports industry in its marketing, fan relations and event production. Athlete-level sports data can be the starting point for sports properties – mainstream or niche – to re-imagine the fan experience and create a “blue ocean” of sports spectatorship: an experience built around sports data, instead of adapted to it.
Types of Sports Data
Sports data can be broken down into four categories:
1) Primary / Human Performance (heart rate, body temperature, blood lactate concentration);
2) Secondary / Athlete Performance (speed, vertical acceleration, joint angular momentum);
3) Tertiary / Sports Performance (tackles, speed of serve, distance jumped);
4) Derived (slugging percentage, goals-against average).
Traditionally, fans almost exclusively interacted with tertiary and derived data, mainly because it was the easiest to observe, measure and report. Primary and secondary data were at the extremes of technical capabilities: either limited to sports science labs or the province of low-tech means such as taking an athlete’s pulse. Either way, inaccessible to the fan.
Wearable Tech and Sports Data
Wearable sports tech is the core of this new fan-athlete connection. Hexoskin is a smart shirt offering comprehensive physiological data including heart rate, breathing rate, stride rate and heart rate variability. The Spree headband by Hothead Technologies features many of the same cardiovascular and mechanical data, as well as body temperature.
Hexoskin uses its inputs to estimate VO2max, the maximum amount of oxygen an athlete can consume – a key factor in endurance sports performance. Data about an athlete’s oxygen consumption during a race, along with her blood lactate concentration provided by an implantable tattoo, could give a knowledgeable fan immense predictive power about the race as well as insight into the athlete’s condition.
Devices that detect secondary sports data are already common among both recreational and professional athletes. The Garmin Forerunner 620 includes stride rate, ground contact time and vertical oscillation, three measures that have been linked to running economy and that exhibit a significant disparity between elite and recreational runners.
Pegasus Sports Performance uses a foot pod that transmits additional bio-mechanical data, such as foot and leg angle at the moment of foot-strike and the dynamics of the leg’s back kick. Impact sensors embedded in football players’ helmets, mouthguards and shirts allow teams and doctors to quantify the trauma of hits. Fans can then approach the force, momentum, impact and other physical measures of a hit through accurate comparisons, rather than just analogies. Is it really like getting hit by a Mack truck, or is it more like being hit by a hybrid? (My apologies in advance to any player who ends up being nicknamed “The Prius” because of this article.)
Connecting Fans to Athletes and Coaches
Everyone experiences stress in their job: asking the boss for a raise, making a client pitch, penalty kicks in the Champions League final, being second-to-last going into the final lap. The best employees make it look easy: calm, confident and in control. Are they, or are they just master bluffers? Providing the fans with an athlete’s breathing rate, heart rate and body temperature as he marches from the top of the box to the spot to take a penalty kick is interesting. Comparing it to the data they pulled off their own quantified self devices earlier in the week when they had to justify their department’s budget makes it real and relevant.
Coaches provide another source of data, which illuminates their in-game managerial stress (and anger) management skills. Coaches’ physiological responses communicate their perspective on the sport, their confidence in their athletes and their ability to compartmentalize their emotions about their work. A former colleague of mine coached professional runners, and wore his heart monitor in the stands at the USA Track & Field National Championships. His heart rate while sitting through the preliminary rounds was in a range usually reserved for his runners, while during the finals it was barely above resting. “So many things can happen in the finals, that you just relax and go with it,” he said. “It’s in the prelims when you find out just how well or how poorly you coached their season.”
Continuous Fan Engagement
With no teams, upwards of a dozen different events and nearly a hundred athletes competing for very brief amounts of time each, an individual fan’s interest and engagement fluctuates considerably over the course of a track meet. Athlete data can provide the continuity that is otherwise missing by supplying a steady source of interaction with the athletes who are competing; and by allowing the fans to follow the condition of their favorite athletes before and after their event.
By keeping people engaged with the action, the property has the opportunity to connect fans with events to which they might otherwise pay little attention. A distance running fan may overlook the throwing events at a track meet. If they are interacting with the data stream throughout the event, though, they can see how the force and angular momentum generated by a shot-putter would translate into something familiar like how high and how far a baseball would travel under similar conditions.
Sponsorship Activation’s
Two of my favorite sponsorship activation’s leveraged human physiology to create powerful and memorable brand alignments. Degree for Men antiperspirant sponsored the “All In” moment during ESPN’s World Series of Poker and US Poker Championships, playing off the adrenaline-induced sweat that comes along with high-risk maneuvers. Pepto-Bismol, knowing what tends to happen to people and their GI tracts at such events, became the “Stomach-Ready Sponsor” of Nathan’s hot dog eating contest in addition to several chili cook-offs.
Integrating primary and secondary sports data into sponsorship activation’s can generate new connections between the sponsor, the sports property and fans. Each data point creates a new item in the property’s sponsorship inventory, ranging from simple naming rights (the Jones’ Air Conditioning, Inc. Body Temperature report) to a more interactive activation when an athlete reaches a particular level for a given metric (“With that last burst of speed, Smith enters the XYZ Company Heart Rate Red Zone!”).
The nature of the sponsor could even help educate new fans about what a particular metric is, and why it matters. For example, heart-rate variability is an indicator of fatigue, so a mattress manufacturer could sponsor HRV. Sponsored notifications from the mattress company could highlight athletes with low HRV’s, and show how a good night’s sleep on their product could improve the athlete’s performance.
Conclusion
The mainstreaming of sabermetrics, the popularity of Billy Beane‘s and Arsene Wenger’s cerebral management styles and features like SportsCenter’s “Next Level” show that fans have a demand for and understanding of metrics that were once the realm of academics and obsessives. Athlete-level data offers new engagement points for fans, properties and sponsors alike, giving them plenty of reasons to leave the couch and come to the stadium.
What data would you most like to see from your favorite athletes or sports? How could it create more value for you as a fan, sponsor or sports property?