The 2018 NFL season will be a transition year in the league’s new digitally based ticketing framework with Ticketmaster, StubHub and SeatGeek, with the full benefits not likely to arrive until next season.
The new open-ticket framework starts this season as a mixed bag among the 32 teams, with at least 14 of them — including the defending champion Eagles — already moving to all-digital systems and no longer allowing any sort of printed tickets. The majority of NFL teams, however, will employ a hybrid approach in which season-ticket holders were given at least the option of receiving commemorative paper tickets that will still be accepted at the gates.
Print-at-home PDF tickets, however, have already been outlawed across the league.
“Fans are still getting used to all this and so are we. It’s been an acclimation process for everybody,” said Baker Koppelman, Baltimore Ravens senior vice president of ticket sales and operations. The Ravens were among the early adopters in the league toward digital tickets and are allowing entry to M&T Bank Stadium only using mobile-based tickets or owner ticket cards for personal seat license holders.
“We’re really looking at this transition as a two-year process, so our feeling was that the more time we gave ourselves to work through that, the better,” Koppelman said.
The league’s long-term future in ticketing, however, involves the widespread use of Ticketmaster’s identity-based Presence system and RFID technology that will allow for an extensive array of real-time analytics, and ideally, better stadium ingress and fraud prevention. Roughly two-thirds of NFL stadiums are slated to have Presence installed this year, with the rest to follow next year.
It also will mean the end of bar code-based entry to NFL stadiums.
“The ability to track and understand your attendees is a huge benefit,” said Brendan Lynch, Ticketmaster senior vice president and general manager of Ticketmaster’s NFL operations.
