On 26-27 March 2024, Alex Roberts, Marketing Director at Stats Perform, attended the 2024 Coliseum Summit Europe. Below, he explains three ways sports content can make the matchday experience more entertaining for fans and sponsors, and how we can help.
I recently attended Coliseum Summit Europe hosted in Tottenham Hotspur’s spectacular stadium. The event examined many themes spanning stadium development new technologies, elevating the VIP+ experience, turning stadiums into multi-purpose venues, sustainability within the industry and much more.
One of the presenters, CAA Icon, showed research that said maintaining matchday atmosphere ranked highest in things important to fans when a new stadium is under development.
I was there because Stats Perform’s deep, proprietary sports data and content can unlock considerable value for teams. It can dramatically enhance how you engage, entertain and delight your fans, and transform how you can monetise your gameday experience.
Our data, insights, visualisations and content bring fans closer to their favourite sports, teams and the players around the world. It turns casual fans into super fans and makes sport mean more to billions around the world.
The event got me thinking.
Are the performances, the many milestones and stories around your team and players being sweated to their fullest potential to not just maintain, but GROW matchday atmosphere?
Sports storytelling drives huge engagement and fan interaction on digital. Now consider the same, rich stories experienced in person inside your stadium, alongside thousands of your fellow sporting family. Seems like a potent mix to me.
Here are three ways that sports content authentically woven into your matchday experience could make gameday more entertaining for fans & sponsors, and how we can make it possible for your next home game.
1. Rich sports stories that make fans come earlier and build community
Attending games is the closest many fans get to your team. Bringing fans closer to your players and the team is a key objective for many professional team departments. It directly connects to greater revenue opportunities and supports many important KPIs that matter throughout your organisation.
There are many proven and widely employed social, digital and broadcast tactics that help fans understand the performances of players and teams, the milestones that have been broken or to look out for, that grow community and fandom. Are they being repurposed into how you talk to your fans when they are with you in person?
What ideas could you employ?
- Your stadium announcements will be more engaging if they use the milestones/player records supplied by our data insights team to drive conversation about your stars and the game
- You can automatically create and display graphics infused with team and player stats, heatmaps, and facts about the game on digital screens throughout your stadium
We have a visual content production engine that automates the creation of stats-rich visuals, making it effortless and fast to update – like this player ranking on the Charlotte Hornets jumbo screen.
2. Sports content that elevates your VIP experience and aligns it tightly to the upcoming game
Many teams are investing heavily in expanding and elevating their premium+ experiences, connecting VIP fans more deeply to the game to make it even more immersive & magical.
Using the screens in these areas to display unique, informative content and beautiful data visualisations tailored for the guests instead of replaying past games on mute does exactly this. It drives rich conversation among the guests, both hardcore and casual fans, and makes them feel like they’re inside the game, seeing unique visuals delivered to them by the gameday team.
At Stats Perform, we do this already with European football giants Bayern Munich, to great effect. Our graphics tool automatically creates and distributes unique content to screens throughout their premium hospitality areas that has been specifically designed to get guests excited and familiar with who and what to look out for, and amplify the in-game entertainment by feeding guests insights they wouldn’t otherwise see.
What else could you do?
- Ask questions to fans about the on-field stats-based stories using your digital screens and reveal the answers to the questions in data visualisation format
- Reward fans with unique offers or discounts if a particular event happened in your previous game or happens in the game
3. Content to make fans louder
Here’s the excellent visual shared by CAA Icon at the Coliseum event which showed the importance of maintaining matchday atmosphere to fans for new stadiums.
Atmosphere is crucial in sport and curating a vociferous one is not only a reason for fans to come back, how many times have we heard players say it lifts their performances?
Can sports data on your screens help make fans noisier? One great way is to make fans aware of records that might be broken. This includes all-time records but also current season records, in-game records, player personal bests. Most fans won’t know about these milestones which makes them even more powerful to get fans excited about the team and showcase the players’ heroics, that they were there to witness. Even metrics like ‘100% success so far’ in different stat categories have a huge impact on the volume of your fans.
4. Bonus: sponsors love this stuff
The beauty of all the ideas discussed above is that sponsors pay and want to be associated with content like this. It connects them to incredible sporting moments and the achievements of your team that fans care deeply about.
We recently compiled a document which contains more than 20 sponsorable assets that work for every game – both pre- and in-game. You can access it below to help your internal brainstorming. We hope you find it useful.
22 New Sponsorable Assets for Every Game
Do you have an idea for your team you’d like to discuss?
We’d love to discuss them with you.
Alternatively, you can meet Stats Perform at the upcoming Coliseum Summit US, hosted at the equally spectacular, GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium. See you in Kansas City June 5-6 2024.
You can pre-book a meeting with us here.
