NFL Schedule Makers Help Design Stadiums And Arenas

A general inside view of Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California. The group behind the NFL schedule is also helping create a fresh perspective in venue design. (Photo by Michael Owens/Getty Images)

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When Andy Tabrizi was 12, he was busy thinking about how he could take data, analyze it in a fresh way and win $50 hustling his friends in fantasy football. There’s nothing fantasy about his affiliations to major sports now. Twenty years later and the CEO of Recentive Analytics, the group behind building the NFL schedule, he’s partnering with major sports organizations such as the NFL, MLB, the English Premier League and the USTA while having a hand in building out some of today’s stadiums and arenas.

Recentive Analytics offers forecasting and predictive modeling. “Regardless of the decision, it should be rooted in a very quantifiable forecast,” Tabrizi tells me, “how to price a ticket, where to place a seat. If I do this here, this will happen; if I do the other thing, this other thing will happen.”

Forecasting models have value in sports. That’s why Recentive Analytics helps the NFL build out its schedule, helping sort the best timing for marquee matchups, kickoff times and more. Last year’s viewership projections from Tabrizi were within 2% of the actual numbers. That’s what keeps the NFL—and others—coming back. And it’s what’s helped Recentive Analytics grow, now reaching into the ticketing space much earlier in the process.

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Ticketing can be about far more than a start time or a date. At its core, it’s also about the physical seat in a venue. Tabrizi is actively working with the Oklahoma City Thunder on the team’s new NBA arena and the University of Oklahoma on its football stadium rebuild. He also helped the NHL’s Seattle Kraken devise accurate ticket revenue forecasts based on seating types.

Typically, when a team is building a new venue—or substantially remodeling one—they look at other teams in their league to help forecast what ticket revenue could be based on seating inventory and type. Tabrizi says that’s like using the same pricing data to shop for a house in Boston as in Philadelphia. For the Kraken, instead of seeing how things work in Vancouver or San Jose, Recentive used a model analyzing data points “across what we thought matters,” focusing on the local economy, job market, real estate, restaurant reservations, Airbnb prices and anything else giving an indicator of local market health.

“Our ability to understand the market hinged on everything that had nothing to do with the hockey team,” he says. “We need to look at the local market.”

With owners—and sometimes cities—spending hundreds of millions or over a billion dollars on a new project, they can’t afford to get the revenue model wrong. Tabrizi says he doesn’t, with the modeling exceeding 97% accuracy, giving teams confidence to make decisions.

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In the past, Recentive had gotten involved in the ticketing process for venues after the build was done, but more recent projects have them involved from the start, helping teams decide exactly how to build out a venue. Should there be more suites? A lower capacity? How should hospitality spaces look? “Impacting them form the beginning is making a bigger difference,” he says. “At the end of the day we can quantify demand in a way that has not existed before, in a level of precision that has not existed before.”

And it’s different for every market and every sport. For the U.S. Open, for example, which is undergoing a renovation of the world’s largest tennis stadium, the difference between the corporate needs and hardcore tennis fan is stark in what they are able and willing to pay for experiences. So, having drastically different ticketing options in the same venue makes sense. But drilling down the specifics is trickier. You may have a family trying to take in as much tennis as possible with a grounds pass in the same site as a major global corporation hosting clients, sometimes with a difference 100 times in what they are willing to pay for the experience.

In Oklahoma City, Tabrizi says they’ve found they can have more premium seating and hospitality spaces than they thought they could, but it may look different than other cities. If fan experience is of a premium value, maybe cutting 1,500 seats from the overall venue improves that experience with shorter wait times and more space on the concourse. Making that tradeoff could then allow the team to increase other ticket prices to make up for the lost 1,500 seats. “There is a balance between capacity and revenue, and they work off each other in ways teams maybe didn’t expect,” Tabrizi says.

For the Sooners, questions come around should premium boxes be six, eight or 10 seats or will someone pay more for an added experience? “This process used to be decided by surveys and focus groups,” Tabrizi says. “I’m not sure you’re going to get someone in a focus groups saying this is the maximum amount I’m willing to spend.” Instead, he’s found that for University of Oklahoma football, the price of oil per barrel is a major driver, as that leads the entire local economy. So, he’s running simulations for the school based on fluctuations in the price of oil. “We let them control their parameters, so when they are presenting to their board, they can consider all the options in real time,” he says.

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By understanding local outside factors, Recentive has found there are more in-venue seating options appealing to fans than traditionally offered. It’s not about one seat with nothing added versus one seat with everything added. “There is a subset of fanbases very interested in top of the top premium and that is what drives the day,” he says. “Those tickets may be 10% of inventory and drive 70% of revenue, as a result making the stadium more attainable. The biggest realization is that one size fits all model where building two separate experiences doesn’t actually work.”

Tabrizi’s goal is to accurately forecast what fans of a specific team in a unique city want from the in-venue experience. That work will lead to a fresh way of designing seating, experiences and hospitality in arenas and stadiums.