Fans cheer before a game between the New York Red Bulls and the New England Revolution during the 2018 MLS Eastern Conference Final. (Photo by Mike Stobe/Getty Images)
Over the past 15 months, the New York Red Bulls have been building an analytics department to enhance the club’s operational efficiencies and the overall fan experience.
While Major League Soccer itself has been trying to promote analytics among its 24 clubs and will host a private workshop for teams in a few weeks at the SAS Global Forum analytics conference, the Red Bulls’ group is one of just a handful of dedicated analytics and strategy departments in the league. The club put Logan Smith, a six-year veteran at the organization who previously served as a marketing manager, in charge of building out the analytics department at the end of 2017.
Smith has expanded his team to five full-time employees and centralized all of the Red Bulls’ previously fragmented data sources. They currently take in information from touch points such as point-of-sale data from concessions and merchandise sales, ticketing, fan surveys, parking, WiFi connectivity, and app or website traffic. All of that is managed within a data warehouse powered by KORE Software.
In the future, Smith said the team will look to add even more data sources, eventually expanding to handle the athletic performance side of the business. They’ll also look to add predictive analytics to determine how to best forecast the behavior of any given fan segment. That should become easier as Red Bull’s fans become increasingly mobile. The team partnered with TicketMaster over the offseason and became a mobile ticketing-only venue—accessible via the Red Bulls’ relaunched mobile app—beginning with the 2019 season. The club also moved to a predominantly cashless environment for in-arena purchases, replacing paper money with credit cards and mobile devices. Smith said the goal is to continue moving in a mobile-first direction in the coming seasons, and using data from those sources to further feed his analytics engine.
“An all-mobile environment is certainly a direction that we’re going in and building towards,” Smith said. “It streamlines the fan experience for us and has the benefit of incremental data collection. We have a multicultural fan base that’s digitally savvy, if not digitally native. So by going mobile, we feel it’s more appealing to them and their experience at the arena.”
Daniel Royer of New York Red Bulls takes the ball in the second half against Minnesota United at Red Bull Arena on Apr. 6, 2019. (Elsa/Getty Images)
So far, mobile ticketing has been a gold mine for data about each person attending a Red Bull game. Previously, even during sold out games, the team only knew definitively the identifies of roughly 20 to 30 percent of the people in the building. With mobile, that’s up to 70 or 80 percent, according to Smith.
“That provides a better picture of who is in the building and the segments of fans who are coming,” he said. “Operationally, it’s better know who is in the building so we can better cater to them.”
The Red Bulls have already started to heed these analytical insights. After receiving feedback last season from fans requesting a better in-arena audiovisual experience, the club installed new video boards in the offseason. The LED displays, located in the north and south ends of the field, are 24-feet high by 55-feet wide, twice as wide as the previous screens. They feature a new wide-angle view that makes them more easily visible no matter where fans are sitting in the stadium. The Daktronics screens also support high-quality live video and instant replay.
“We’re getting those datasets together so we can ask sophisticated questions of it,” Smith said. “That’s an ongoing project. There’s always new data sources coming in, and we’re always integrating with them to continue to build out the picture of our fan base.”
As the analytics department has started to prove its value, more and more people within the organization have begun to rely on it. The analytics team is starting to get inbound analytics requests from tangential business departments such as parking. The club is now in the process of analyzing how the arena’s parking facilities are being utilized and how they might best facilitate the arrival of fans on game days. Red Bull’s spaceship-like arena is located in a small New Jersey city a few miles southwest of Manhattan, requiring NYC-based fans to navigate busy road networks to and from the stadium.
Smith is currently focused on ramping up analytics capabilities, building out a customer data warehouse, stitching together disparate data sources into one unified system, and increasing his team’s headcount. Another area of expansion will be figuring out how to better utilize the arena when soccer games aren’t taking place, which can significantly affect franchise revenues.
“I think the organizational buy-in [to analytics] and commitment to the development of this team is unique in the MLS—there’s only a couple other clubs in the league taking this approach,” Smith said. “Generally, people are excited to have that support behind them that way when they make a decision it’s backed up with some underlying research.”
Overall, the Red Bulls’ analytics department’s focus will be centered on improving fan experience. That could mean easing the friction and frustrations supporters might face going to a game by improving parking and leveraging mobile technologies, or by building a better team—the Red Bulls are currently ninth in the Eastern Conference, but reached the MLS Cup semifinals last season.
“A sports team has two charges: to put a competitive team on the field and win games, and to ultimately provide a memorable experience for anyone who walks through our doors or engages with our club in some way,” Smith said. “What we’re doing is informing how we can make those experiences more memorable and impactful for anyone we engage with. We’ve taken a hard look through customer research on game days with what our fans want in a fan experience in the arena and have ongoing projects to cater our experience to them.”
