Who Owns The Fan?

Attending a game has never been pricier. I’d argue the 9‑9‑9 challenge is more of a financial flex than a physical feat these days.

This week I’m featuring a piece from a friend with a private equity background and a sharp analytical lens on the business of sports.

He breaks down one of the most under‑leveraged opportunities in the game: the gap between what teams think they own and what they actually control.

If you care about where the money actually flows in live sports, this one’s worth your time.

-Brent

We all know going to a game isn’t cheap these days. What’s more interesting is where that money actually goes.

You’re easily down $200+ on tickets and $30 on parking before getting in the door, you’ll spend at least $50 on food and drinks, and maybe drop another $80 on merchandise.

The ticketing platform captured the sale and took a service fee. The concessionaire processed your food or merchandise order and credit card payment. The parking lot operator manages the gate. In each transaction, an intermediary sits between the fan and the team…and while the team finds a way to get a cut of each transaction, it doesn’t own any of them end-to-end.

Competent organizations already have the systems in place to capture enough fan data to effectively segment and market to their fan base. However, the willingness of teams to cede ownership of fan transactions to intermediaries is a missed opportunity to capture better data, claw back margin, and deploy more lucrative packaging and pricing models.

One of the more nuanced transactions in the fan journey is buying tickets. For this example, assume a fan is buying through a third-party ticketing marketplace (e.g., Ticketmaster or AXS) and that marketplace is the exclusive ticketing provider for the fan’s team. The dollar flow is relatively simple but there are two sale types:

Regardless of whether the sale is primary or secondary, the ticketing platform and the team each collect very similar data from the buyer. The ticketing platform captures the fan’s identity, payment information, device, and browsing. The team gets a narrower but powerful slice including the fan’s identity, seat location, price paid for admission, and attendance. The team generally will not get a fan’s full cross-event attendance history or broader profile the ticketing platform builds for each individual over time.

Another essential transaction on the fan journey is buying an overpriced (and often mediocre) meal and beer at the game. Concessions are either run by the team / venue itself or by an outsourced concessionaire (e.g., Aramark, Levy) which is most common at larger stadiums and arenas. The venue collects that revenue if they operate the concessions. If outsourced, the concessionaire keeps a percentage of the revenue and the team / venue gets the rest.

As simple as a hotdog purchase may seem, the data flow here differs based on who owns the POS. If the team owns the POS, they have more control and flexibility over the raw concessions data, and if not they’re beholden to the concessionaire. Modern POS checkout-free solutions offered by the likes of Zippin and Aifi build the POS infrastructure into the venue, giving the team / venue ownership of the transaction record. The nuance is that the transaction data is of highest value when it can be linked back to a specific fan, which isn’t always possible when collecting credit card detail.

The same dynamic plays out across parking and merchandise — different vendors, same pattern.

Competent organizations are already capturing enough data through a horizontal CDP (Customer Data Platform) to reap benefits. There are also sports-specific platforms, like StellarAlgo which is used by 100+ teams, that exist to unify data sources in the stadium setting. I’d argue that if you gave teams a perfect 360-degree view of each fan, they may not do much differently than they’re doing today.

Data capture is already a significant revenue driver for teams that use it well. On the ticket sales side, teams are running models fed by attendance rates, resell frequency, and add-on spend to flag season ticket holders at renewal risk — a few points of retention on a large STH base moves real money. For single-game sales, the opportunity is more targeted outreach: a fan who bought one weekend rivalry game within twenty miles of the stadium last year is a better candidate for a specific push than generic “buy tickets” spam.

Sponsorship is where the data story gets interesting for outside partners. Robust fan segmentation gives sponsors confidence they’re reaching the right audience and can track outcomes against spend — which is what moves deals from impressions-based to performance-based. On the ops side, concessions data shapes everything from which concepts to run at which stands to when to staff full-service versus grab-and-go, and which in-stadium experiences — a kid zone, live music, a fan activation — will actually drive incremental spend given who’s in the building that night.

The value of perfect fan data feels marginal; the greater upside is in owning the rails where transactions happen. Teams should be focused most on clawing back margin from intermediaries and retaining ownership of fan behavior data.

Wrestling control back from intermediaries is harder than it sounds — especially when the intermediary is a behemoth like Ticketmaster. It has multi-year contracts with most venues and teams and in many cases, they’re exclusive. Ticketmaster is also already getting more data than the team from a ticket transaction, so there’s no real angle for the team to offer better insights in exchange for lower fees.

Despite those unfavorable dynamics, teams can regain leverage. One option is re-routing ticket sales through team-owned entry points like the team app, website, or wallet and treating Ticketmaster as the plumbing to facilitate the ticket transfer rather than the consumer-facing destination. Ticketmaster has more pricing power over the team if 100% of ticket volume goes through their platform but that negotiation looks different if the team can prove that it can drive a meaningful portion of ticket sales through a team portal that white-labels Ticketmaster.

Independent ticketing solutions, like Tixr and vivenu, are building toward this team-friendly model. These platforms offer a white-label experience where teams are the merchant of record and retain fan data ownership. Neither have the level of scale and distribution as Ticketmaster, but they represent what an alternative infrastructure looks like.

Zooming out, Ticketmaster is a single intermediary sitting between the team and fans, and these intermediaries exist within almost every fan transaction. From concessions to parking to merchandise, there are different vendors owning the transaction rails and keeping their own slice of the data and margin from these transactions.

The real question is behavioral. How do you move your fanbase off the intermediary’s platform and onto yours — and use that adoption to rewrite the terms?

My answer is a fan wallet. One that is not merely a way to go cashless (e.g., SoFi Stadium Wallet), but gives each fan a single identity with a payment rail sitting underneath every purchase they make with their team. A cashless solution simplifies venue operations. A wallet-as-an-identity solution puts the team in the driver’s seat to own the relationship with the fan.

The wallet solves a data problem across every intermediary. But follow the money and it points to one place: ticketing. Amongst the intermediaries, the ticketing platforms have the lowest percentage of variable costs. Servicing an incremental ticket or event for a ticketing platform comes at almost no cost relative to the other intermediaries, which provide product and service-intensive offerings. The math here is straightforward: ticketing platforms have margin to give, which allows teams to negotiate hardest with them. Push too hard on the concessionaire or parking operator and they might walk away from the venue entirely — a risk most teams aren’t willing to take.

Tickets also happen to be the largest dollar item purchased by the fan, so percentage savings on fees from the ticketing platform are going to drive larger absolute dollar savings for the team.

Driving adoption within the fanbase is another nut to crack, and it won’t happen overnight. That said, teams can get creative with their offerings to entice fans to use their wallet:

If a team can pull this strategy off, it changes their negotiating posture with intermediaries and provides tangible leverage to improve margins. It allows teams to prevent leakage from their economic ecosystem and create a pull for fans to come back and spend by breaking the silos between different purchase categories. And it creates a new revenue opportunity by broadening sponsorship opportunities and allowing the team to give sponsors data that inspires confidence in the partnership.

Capitalizing on this thesis requires focus in two areas.

The first is the infrastructure that lives within the team or league app. This solution handles login, maintenance of a single fan ID, wallet balance / credits / points, the ability to pay with the wallet in venue or online and serves as the rules engine for who earns points, who can redeem them, and where they can redeem them. This type of solution is the operating system for the fan and the guardrails for the currency the team owns. It defines the identity of the fan and operates the wallet but does not manage the vendor integrations itself.

The second is the layer that manages the integrations with the vendors – it sits between the fan wallet and the different third-party systems from the intermediaries. This solution takes the simple request (or API call) from the fan wallet, translates the instruction into the format the vendor’s system expects, and sends the request to the vendor. This keeps the wallet and ID ecosystem more stable by making the vendor integration process less painful. From the team’s perspective, this allows them to treat the intermediaries as utilities and reduces friction associated with swapping Ticketmaster for AXS as your exclusive ticketing partner, for example.

Ideally, the customer or team will want both solutions together. If you just have the wallet, the pain, time, and cost of switching vendors and integrating a new vendor with your wallet is going to limit your negotiating power with intermediaries. With just the router, vendor integration is simple but the fan experience is disjointed and less valuable to the team given they’d have multiple account systems and payment methods.

The most compelling company building toward this vision is Jump, which was founded by Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez. Jump claims to cover both layers, offering a unified platform for ticketing, fan identity, and commerce, with the vendor integrations managed inside that same system. Adoption to date is nascent with the Timberwolves and Lynx, both co-owned by Lore and A-Rod, as the marquee customers. That said, Forerunner, Courtside, and Seven Seven Six have all backed the company which has raised $60M to date. The combination of Lore’s e-commerce background from founding Jet.com and the ownership and control the solution appears to offer teams makes Jump a company to keep an eye on.

The bigger story is structural: for the first time, teams have a credible path to owning the full fan relationship. The ones that move will negotiate from strength. The ones that don’t will keep splitting the check with intermediaries who built their business on team inaction.