Spectacle Becoming Standard for Sporting Events After Gen Z Attendees – Sportico.com

It’s hard to imagine now, in our post F1: Drive to survive world, but in 2016 Formula 1 was still struggling to gain a foothold in the US. At the time, Austin’s Circuit of the Americas course was in danger of falling off the sport’s schedule after the Texas government scaled back its support for the US Grand Prix. “I think we’re screwed,” COTA CEO Bobby Epstein said at the time. “The big question now is: is racing coming back?”

Enter Taylor Swift.

Epstein knew that an appearance by the megastar the day before the race would be considered an insult to racing purists, but since 80,000 people turned up for the show on COTA’s Super Stage, it’s clear he’s made a successful turning point. This weekend the race set a local record with a total of almost 270,000 participants.

Viewership fell again in subsequent years, but remained above 2014 and 2015 levels. Then Netflix helped propel growth into the hyperdrive. Last year the event drew a record 440,000 fans.

“We created something where if you’re not a race fan, you’re going to have something that you loved that day and gave you a reason to go,” Epstein said in December.

Fans go to sporting events today for different reasons than they did a generation ago, and their expectations have changed when they arrive. The game better be good, but the experience can’t end there.

“The fan wants these big events to get bigger,” said Steve Mayer, NHL chief content officer and EVP.

Judging by last weekend, sports real estate is reacting. There were about as many musical performers at the NBA All-Star Game as there were Western Conference starters. The NHL brought their Stadium Series to North Carolina, turning a regular-season matchup into a spectacle. NASCAR’s Daytona 500 began with drivers walking down a red carpet and stepping onto the stage for individual introductions. Then there was the (again) new XFL, a league built to “bring entertainment to world-class football.”

To understand how we got here, jump back to 1980. That summer, during the MLB All-Star game, Dodger Stadium unveiled the world’s first stadium video screen. Jumbotrons began popping up in stadiums across the country in the years that followed, as teams wanted to offer the instant replays and close-ups that fans had come to expect on television.

But it didn’t take long for the cameras to stray from the field either. There is no recorded date for the Kiss Cam’s introduction, although it appears to have been a regular tradition as early as the mid-1980s. Stadiums also began to feature simple racing points on their boards to entertain fans between innings. until 1987, UPI covered “the MTV era of American sports.”

Of course, these days seem quaint today. You could fit the 1980 Dodger Stadium board into the SoFi Stadium wraparound video panel 80 times. The Rams team responsible for programming the so-called Infinity Screen has two priorities: creating a home field advantage for the team and putting together a fun event that will leave visitors happy, win or lose. In-game entertainment is no longer just about achieving what fans can get at home. Nowadays it’s also about getting them enthusiastic about the sport in the first place. And that goes beyond offering the latest jumbotronik.

A 2018 Deloitte report on stadium experience preferences found that Baby Boomer fans were most interested in identifying with the team that was playing. However, younger fans were relatively more interested in everything related to the game – live entertainment before events, alternative activities during the action, the other people they might meet along the way. And in many of those categories, casual fans expressed less than 50% satisfaction with what sport currently has to offer.

It should come as no surprise, then, that only 18% of Gen Z respondents in a 2022 survey said they had attended a professional sporting event in the past year. In comparison, this cohort led all others in expected concert attendance last year, with 65% of 18-24 year olds planning to go to a summer show, according to another survey.

So it’s only natural for the sport to take a page or two from the playbooks of other events. “Build it and they will come,” reads the (misquoted) line. But that’s outdated. Now you better program it too.

Looking for new ideas, NHL executives visited two music festivals in Florida earlier this month ahead of the league’s all-star celebrations. It took another step forward with its Stadium Series Saturday, letting fans fill the end zones of Carter-Finley Stadium in Raleigh to recreate the infield feel of a horse race and allowing fans for pre-game and in-game musical performances left the pause on the stage.

St. Louis’ new MLS team is in the midst of similar preparations, with the expansion team’s first tilt of 2023 taking place this weekend. In addition to hosting a series of games, executives are also thinking of programming “17 festivals”.

Later this summer, NASCAR will return to the main stage to add another twist to the combination of music and sports. In addition to a new street race, Chicago will host a two-day festival of concerts in Grant Park featuring The Chainsmokers, Miranda Lambert and more. Organizers, led by event president Julie Giese, worked with a production group with close ties to Chicago’s Lollapalooza festival to put together the lineup.

“It’s really about introducing our sport to new fans,” Giese said in an interview. “That’s our priority and our number one goal here.”