U.S. Soccer has extended its partnership with TicketMaster as the organization’s official ticketing provider, with plans to leverage TicketMaster’s new biometrics capabilities.
The new multi-year deal includes U.S. Soccer’s use of Ticketmaster Presence at both U.S. Men’s and Women’s National Team games. Presence aims to move venues from paper tickets to mobile ticketing, which is considered more trackable and secure. Ticketmaster is planning to add biometrics-based identity recognition, such as facial recognition, to Presence.
Ticketmaster has been expanding the use of Presence since launching it in 2017. The company has a major deal with the NFL that has seen a number of football stadiums adopt mobile ticketing over the past year. For U.S. Soccer, digital ticketing is expected to touch some 250,000 soccer fans annually.
U.S. Soccer began to leverage Ticketmaster Presence as part of a previous deal. The system tracks the chain of ownership of a ticket so that teams have insight not only into who bought a ticket, but who it was transferred to, and who actually attended an event.
Besides increasing venue security by helping U.S Soccer keep track of who enters each venue for a game, the organization can also use this information to collect fan data, and to deliver unique and individualized in-game information and experiences, such as promotional offers.
“U.S. Soccer’s mission is to make soccer the preeminent sport in the United States and we believe that Ticketmaster provides our fans with a best-in-class purchasing and venue access experience for our events across the country,” said U.S. Soccer CCO Jay Berhalter, in a statement.
Ticketmaster will additionally provide fan and live event intelligence through LiveAnalytics to U.S. Soccer sports teams and venues. Based on that data, a team of Ticketmaster statisticians, modelers, and researchers will produce insights into purchasing behaviors and in-game preferences. That is expected to help U.S. Soccer better market tickets and experiences to individual fans.
“Through identity-based ticketing and our suite of analytics tools, U.S. Soccer will be better equipped to reach more fans than ever before in much more targeted and tailored ways,” said Ticketmaster president Jared Smith.
U.S. Soccer has been adopting new technologies to give its athletes, coaches, and fans new tools to help grow the sport. On the athletic side, it created a high performance department in 2017 with dedicated staff focused on ensuring player health, performance, and longevity.
In 2018, U.S. Soccer inked a deal with StatSports for comprehensive in-game data collection and launched a bio-banding initiative with academy clubs to support long term player development. Bio-banding enables players to be grouped based on their maturity and biological age and not by their chronological age, ensuring athletes of similar skill levels are training together.