Zebra Technologies has renewed its player-tracking deal with the NFL through the 2022 Super Bowl and is now eyeing an expansion into NCAA football and other pro sports.
The maker of player-tracking technology has been working with the NFL since 2014 to power the league’s Next Gen Stats. In its initial five-year deal with the league, which concluded after last season’s Super Bowl, Zebra saw its RFID chips embedded in every uniformed player’s shoulder pads and the game ball.
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Its chip receivers are now installed in all 31 NFL stadiums, with all six international NFL games being added this season: two at the new Tottenham Stadium in London, two at Wembley Stadium in London, one in Mexico City at Estadio Azteca, and a preseason game at Investors Group Field in Winnipeg, Canada. Data produced by these trackers power an array of third-party media products, from broadcasts to Amazon-powered data visualizations.
“We’re the fuel that goes into the engine that ends up in a really nice car,” says John Pollard, the vice president of business development at Zebra Sports.
Pollard says the contract renewal with the NFL has been a “revalidation” that has already started to lead to inbound leads from individual NFL clubs that are interested in using the tracking data during practice, a premium service already used by a third of NFL teams to track and manage player load.
“We have an opportunity to sell analogous systems to teams for their training facilities,” says Pollard. “It’s a business opportunity working with the clubs. And we also like that they can start to do more advanced analytics by comparing game output data with practice data.”
Clubs are now additionally discussing the potential of using Zebra data to fuel fan outreach and in-stadium activations as well; another “opportunity that we see expanding,” says Pollard. However, the scale at which those requests come to fruition will likely be at the discretion of the league, he says.
Meanwhile, the company has been attracting interest from other sports and leagues. It has already tested tracking technology with the NBA’s G League, FIFA and other global soccer leagues, as well as a collegiate lacrosse league. In football, Zebra has dabbled in the NCAA, powering the 2018 Senior Bowl to help scouts evaluate potential draft prospects, and working with Ohio State University. Pollard says further expansion has become a priority and that the company is looking to expand deeper into collegiate football, including adding Bowl games, and into other sports.
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“We’ve received a lot of incoming traffic from other sports as well from sports leagues across the world: soccer, basketball, rugby, Australian football,” says Pollard.
Of course, not all of this is out of a love for athletics: Pollard says a healthy sports business has translated well to its clients across the logistics, healthcare and retail industries.
Zebra is a publicly traded company with a decades-long history of providing rugged hardware devices and tracking tools to businesses operating outside of sports. Since announcing its deal with the NFL in the summer of 2014, shares of Zebra have rocketed 166%, while the broader NASDAQ has increased just 75% over the same period of time. Not all of that can be attributed to Zebra Sports, but increased brand awareness stemmed from the NFL deal has trickled down into other parts of Zebra’s core business.
“We really enjoy the affiliation with the NFL itself,” says Pollard. “As a public company that’s tenured in operations/logistics, retail…our core businesses all really enjoy referencing what we’re doing in the league. We benefit from the strong brand of the NFL and the individual teams we’re working with.”
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