Smart Stadium as a Laboratory of Innovation: Technology,Sport,and Datafied Normalization of the Fans

Smart Stadium as a Laboratory for Smart Cities: A Historical Perspective

The smart stadium presents an interdisciplinary topic of study that merges different scholarly perspectives. While stadiums have been studied mostly by sport geographers and architectural historians in terms of their influence on broader urban transformation (Bale, 2003; Flowers, 2011; Frank & Steets, 2010; Gratton & Henry, 2001), they provide a space of productive inquiry for mediasport scholars as they are a “space thoroughly permeated by media technologies” (Palvarini & Tosi, 2013).

Sport communication scholarship thus far has examined the utility of stadium and assessed its value based on economic/noneconomic terms: questioning the nature of the relationship between the upgraded stadium facilities and tax revenue (Baade, 1996), their capability to generate noneconomic values such as fan mobilization and community enhancement (Crompton, 2004; Mondello et al., 2009; Wakefield & Sloan, 1995), and public communication strategies for implicating fans and the wider community in stadium development projects (Huberty et al., 2016; McGehee et al., 2018). One of the defining characteristics of the above approaches to the stadium is its focus on cause–effects analysis. From a managerial perspective, they generally view the stadium as productive of desirable effects (i.e., spillover to the regional economy such as the job creation, increased tax revenue, and community spirit) and ask what factors could increase those effects.

On the other hand, over the past decades, critical sociology of sport has investigated the institutional alignment between late capitalism and hyper-commodification of mediated sport (Gruneau & Horne, 2016; Jhally, 1984; Kellner, 1996). Sport scholars adopting a cultural approach examined the symbolic construction of meaning amongst the stadium attendants (Butterworth, 2014; Kassing & Nyaupane, 2019). Adding a “spatial” lens, another group of scholars has examined the role of mediasport in the production of space and highlighted how the stadium could be viewed as a mediated architecture which functions as a “giant entertainment studio” (Frank & Steets, 2010; Palvarini & Tosi, 2013).

Building upon these previous works, we suggest that the smart stadium opens up a new series of critical questions that pair these concerns with digitalizing practices and processes that shape and reconfigure the existing relationship between sport, media, industry, and the fans. In the smart stadium, games are no longer just an object of commodified spectacles but an ongoing site of data exploitation and experimentation that involves athletes, stadium managers, fans, and researchers who either voluntarily or unknowingly contribute to the overarching regime of innovation. Smart stadiums are, at once, a site for staging and testing the latest technological interventions in sport and, more importantly, a disciplinary ground that enables cultural debates on the workings and advantages of big data and innovation that implicate individuals beyond the stadium’s spatial–temporal boundaries.

Sport historians have charted the close connection between sport games and modern technoscientific innovation that goes back to the 17th century. For instance, in Sports and Modernity, Gruneau (2017) takes a long-term view of critiquing the emergence of sport in parallel with the history of modernity and capitalism, in which sporting spectacles played an important role in the modernization project. In this history of modern sport, a useful connection is made between the sporting landscapes and international exhibitions that both functioned as sites for “staging” capitalist and colonial modernity. Just as the sites of the industrial exhibition in 19th-century France mediated the symbolic display of national power and expanded the rational measurement and administration of populations, the spaces of modern sport games (the Olympics in particular) served as an exhibition site for progressive moral values and techniques for self-observation and improvement.

Tracing this long history has been integral to the emerging subfield of sport and big data, especially those that have looked at the interconnections between modern sport with the disciplinary ethos and statistical techniques of managing society toward “progress” (Milington & Milington, 2015; Stauff, 2018). How then, does this long history of modern sport, and its entanglements, find new expressions in the contemporary smart stadiums? If contemporary smart stadiums inherit the motifs and techniques of organizing sites for demonstrating spectacles of modernity, how do they also substantially extend and transform this tradition?

At a basic technical level, making a stadium smart relies on the ongoing hypes around big data to enhance the existing computational capabilities of the stadium, such as wireless access points, networked sensors and cameras, high-definition video displays, and in-stadium navigation services. One of the crucial drivers leading this trend is the increasing demand for “mediated” experience of sport by younger fans. For the young adults who are more used to watching sport through their screens while playing video games like esports or fantasy sports (Ruihley & Hardin, 2014), going to the stadium is secondary to their viewing experience. It suggests that the previous relationship between the “actual” and mediated experience of sport, wherein the actual viewing of the sport occupied the primary position, has been reversed to the one in which the mediated experience is gradually outcompeting the actual. Such reversal marks a crucial conjuncture in the history of “gradual artificialization of sports” (Stauff, 2018), at which attending a live game is no longer the default gateway to fandom.

Importantly, the mediated experience of sport affords the stadium operators enhanced tools to organize and securitize the stadium’s digital and physical infrastructures, by altering the conditions by which the stadium space is produced and thereby profoundly influencing the “form, function, and meaning” of space (Kitchin & Dodge, 2011). What deserves our scrutiny here is the specific ways in which sport’s symbolic power is appropriated as a motif of nonsporting goals, which is to bring the stadium attendants in alignment with the aim and rationale of the authority, such as population measurement and management, and fostering the values of innovation and entrepreneurship at the same time. The hyperdigitalized stadium’s reinvention as an ongoing laboratory of innovation, we suggest, performs at least three core functions, which is to exhibit and extol the value of technological progress alongside the physical excellence of the athletes, turn the live games into the test beds for data collection and experimentation, and enroll the stadium attendees as the subject of the innovation regime.

In the following section, we explore how the meaning of “smartness” is articulated in the smart stadium by taking a closer look at a case of ASU’s SDS renovation project. We will trace how the smartness of SDS has been constructed by the techniques of reforming ASU as a “knowledge enterprise,” which has fostered the ethos and culture of innovation for the past two decades. As will be seen, multiple stakeholders around the SDS project relied on this institutional context of ASU that rendered innovation as an inevitable process, if not a moral imperative imposed upon the broader community beyond campus.

Permeable Boundaries of the Smart Stadium

Looking at the smart stadium’s institutional context helps us position the overarching rationale of innovation crisscrossing the “permeable boundaries” of the stadium, which never stands alone in the analysis. In this section, we examine how the stadium is constructed by the techniques and narratives of the university, which functions as a knowledge infrastructure that conditions certain facts, techniques, and narratives of smartness to hold particular relevance in the present. Given the long-term trend to integrate the university into the knowledge-based economic development model (Leydesdorff & Etzkowitz, 1995), it is imperative to interrogate the role of the university in the broader infrastructure of capital accumulation and regimes of truth that concretizes such trend in many sectors including sport.

With the announcement of a new official brand contract with Adidas, called the Global Sports Alliance in 2017, the ASU president Michael Crow reaffirmed the university’s commitment to innovation and entrepreneurship and his strategy to turn the university into a “ready-made action lab” for companies like Adidas (ASU Now, 2017). Active engagement with corporate partners, like Starbucks, Amazon, and Intel, has distinguished ASU’s reputation, which in 2018 was named by U.S. News and World Report “the most innovative school in the nation” (Faller, 2018). In his book, Designing the New American University, Crow, with his coauthor Dabars (Crow & Dabars, 2015), advocates his managerial approach that positions the university as the central locus of innovation, which he calls the knowledge enterprise—a utilitarian model of university that assumes the facilitating role for technological progress and economic growth, for which the value of knowledge is assessed by its adaptability, scalability, and economic impact.

Crow’s strong commitment to innovation helped turn the SDS into a “smart stadium,” which reflected his philosophy of the “New American University.” ¹ Even before its official reopening in September 2018, SDS had been promoted as one of North America’s first smart stadium on a college campus, serving as a venue for staging and marketing the smartness and “innovativeness” of ASU. The development was also framed as a transnational initiative called the Smart Stadium for Smarter Living, which brought together multiple stakeholders, including Dublin City University, Intel, and the Gaelic Athletic Association. More broadly, the SDS development followed metropolitan Phoenix’s succession of public–private partnership strategies to find new sources of revenue, which expected the stadium to lure people downtown and boost land value and community morale. On the one hand, ASU’s rise in the national rankings in innovation was undoubtedly something for the city officials to tout in recruiting high-tech industries. ASU’s reinvention as the knowledge enterprise involved morphing the university into a pool of knowledge workers, an incubator of new businesses, and an enabler of local economic growth. This transition aligned well with the interests of the local authority. As Ross (2011) has documented in detail, developers and home builders are the most powerful players in the laissez-faire state of Arizona. They had readily adopted the progressive languages of sustainability and innovation to cater to their development goals. Seeing the speculative profit of digitally retrofitted stadium, which would fix permanent value to the land, they helped ASU to leverage several financing strategies, which involved selling revenue bonds and authorizing the special tax district, called the Novus Innovation Hub, for ASU to pay its debt through future commercial developments within the district.

Looking closely at the fine-grained level at which the imperative of innovation articulates in the smart stadium, it becomes clear that the SDS’s smart transition is inseparable from the ASU’s governing strategy, deeply embedded in the imperatives of innovation and entrepreneurship. If major league stadiums are sites of mythologizing and memorializing the nation (Butterworth, 2014), college sports stadiums are peculiar sites for shaping and demonstrating the ideals of the university. Attempts to position the smart stadium as “a living laboratory” (Panchanathan et al., 2016), then, are an outgrowth of the increasing tendency to adopt an engineering perspective to approach university as an assemblage of laboratories. This view can be seen in the proliferating number of lab-based research units across the campus such as “Sports Knowledge Lab,” “Digital Audiences Lab,” and “Public Relations Lab” as well as the ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability’s approach to the campus as “a living laboratory of sustainable innovation.”

As a result, the statistical techniques of monitoring the progress have been shared between the SDS and the ASU’s knowledge enterprise, seen in examples such as the ASU’s “Success Coach” program and “e-Advisor” program that track and measure students’ academic performances (Brennan et al., 2014). Using the Intel’s sensors and gateways and Microsoft’s cloud platform in a similar vein, SDS has turned live games into a testing ground for demoing technologies and monitoring crowd behavior. The progress justified the researchers’ enrollment of fans as “the manageable yet scalable size of population” for their smart cities research (Panchanathan et al., 2019), while the mediations of fan behaviors regularly occurred without their consent. The stadium attendees are viewed as a means to develop analytic toolkits for surveillance, such as the machine learning–based crowd analysis program that measures the crowd size, density, noise level, and movement patterns (Panchanathan et al., 2016) and even distinguishes the “bad yelling” from “good yelling” through analyzing the sound data (Slye, 2017).

That the smart stadium is a laboratory for testing the prototypes of smart city technologies gives us several important points to mention here, especially regarding the spatialization of statistical techniques and entrepreneurial ethos of viewing sports. First, by spatialization, we mean the ongoing processes of permeation and integration of media technologies into mundane infrastructures and everyday spaces of sport-related activities. In part driven by the global shift in the service business that targets the consumer “experience” as a whole commoditized package (Borowy & Jin, 2013), the spatialization of statistical techniques is intensified by the wholesale datafication process that reconfigures the modalities of encountering, sensing, and “experiencing” sporting events in mediated spaces such as in the stadium environment.

Datafication of the stadium space constitutes the landscape of permeable boundaries of software-sorted society (Wood & Graham, 2006), which enacts a technological system of social ordering that is increasingly difficult to negotiate. It raises several open questions of what types of data are to be collected, for what specific use, what the amount of “enough data” might be for those specific purposes, and whether one can opt out from the system without penalties. Arguably, the answers to these questions will always be an approximation at best, due to the constantly changing and updating nature of the digital platform that unsettles and obscures the asymmetric power relations between the ordinary fans and the stadium managers, which complicates the task of setting standards to regulate these technologies at the stadium. The perpetually speculative nature of the smart stadium explains why the terms like “proof-of-concept,” “prototypes,” “demos,” and “trials” are quite liberally used in its surrounding narratives, which suggests naturalization of “demo as a form of logic and practice” (Halpern & Günel, 2017, para. 4). The “logic of prototyping, versioning, demoing” plays a central function in disseminating smart technologies into the environment, which engenders incomplete, preliminary, and speculative installations of prototypes of a city seen as a sterile “test bed” (Halpern et al., 2013).

At this point, it can be said that the business of the smart stadium, which is a precursor for the business of the smart cities, problematically relies on technical fixes for the problems that are reduced to the matter of efficiency, security, and profitability. The mandate for smartness and innovation, which fetishizes change and disruption, enacts a system that feeds on itself and chases a continually receding horizon that can hardly be reached. It reinforces a technocratic vision of viewing the sporting space as a mere aggregate of variables that can be measured and optimized to produce an efficient system. This cultural obsession with the computational approach to everyday spaces is highly problematic, as Mattern (2017) points out, as it runs the risk of reifying, essentializing, and even depoliticizing the data and obscuring the institutional and political context in which the vast amount of data is commodified and accessed.

Our second point regards the normalization of the new social ordering through digital mediasport. By normalization, we not only mean the distinction between the features of “normal crowd” behavior against those of “abnormal” ones but also the attempts to “normalize” and shape preferred behaviors in the fans. In the next section, we will discuss how the smart stadium functions as a conduit of normalization and how the digital technologies afford a new level of flexibility to the systemic normalization that ensnares the attendees in a constant interplay between freedom and rule in the game. We will consider contradictions about the smart stadium’s datafying conditions, such as how the narratives of enhancement associated with these technologies are used to justify the workings of disciplinary mechanism.

Normalization of Fan Behavior Through Data

Datafication of fan experience is markedly intensifying the biopolitical power relations within which fans engage with sports (Mwaniki, 2017). Through the rise of biofandom, as Mwaniki (2017) argues, fans internalize a quantified and statistical way of viewing themselves (and their bodies) and accept surveillance as a normal condition. Following this, we claim that the smart stadium presents a new site through which the previous biopolitical relations between fans and sport extend their horizon to get played out in spatial terms.

Arguably, the goal to enhance the fan experience through the application of big data in the stadium is a corollary to the goal to economize and hyper-rationalize its mode of operation. At the user end of the smart stadium infrastructure, fans regularly become subjected to the targeted marketing messages, promotions, and apps that nudge them to consume merchandise and refreshment. These enhanced features generate more benefits for the stadium operators than for the fans, especially as the aggregate data can be multiply exploited and even handed over to the third parties (Melander, 2017). Fans are viewed as “sources of data that feed the urban algorithmic machines and as consumers of data concerned primarily with their efficient navigation and consumption” (Mattern, 2014, para. 8). At the same time, the sheer volume and variety of data gathered from the fans’ detailed interactions with the environment (e.g., location, duration of travel and waiting, heat, humidity, noise) make such relations less and less visible to ordinary fans. Nor are they entitled to know what happens to their data and understand how and where the mediation of their experience takes place within and beyond the stadium. ²

More crucially, the smart stadium’s data-based attendance and behavior monitoring technologies reinforce sport’s function as a disciplinary mechanism, while the actual workings of power are increasingly adopting relational and parametric terms of defining normalcy. For instance, the smart stadium digitally mediates the interactivity amongst the fans through its “game within the games” feature, such as the ASU’s Victory Cheer, which uses noise data captured from different sections of the stadium to create competition among different groups of the fans (Panchanathan et al., 2016). In a related context, the University of Alabama football team uses the Tide Loyalty Points app to quantify and reward fan loyalty by measuring an individual fan’s staying time at the game. ³ These initiatives use “competition amongst the fans” to intensify their preferred behaviors, which are determined either by relational superiority (e.g., making louder noise than the other fans) or by established parameters (e.g., staying time at the stadium until the end of the game). In the context of SDS, the ASU researchers are combining the venue data with machine learning to establish the parameter of normal fan behavior. This process involves training the computer to learn the audiovisual features of the “steady-state” crowd, including their habits and actions, which then can be used to detect and categorize the outliers as the abnormal fans (Panchanathan et al., 2019). With the advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning, we will see more of these attempts to expand the biopolitical power relations in multiple horizons, which shift the previous biopolitical dynamic targeting individual bodies and behaviors to capture the broader domains of behavioral “patterns” and “crowd features.”

These techniques of normalization complement more direct ways in which security is designed into the stadium management, such as “clear bag policy,” divided section arrangements, and surveillance technologies. As Schimmel (2017) has observed, contemporary stadiums are primary sites for testing the latest security and surveillance technologies and fostering dutiful and security-conscious citizens. In the context of the college sports stadium, the techniques of knowing and governing bodies in space are legitimated through the less overtly militant language of research, innovation, and fan engagement. Meaning, the seemingly progressive languages of innovation and entrepreneurship are used to obfuscate the disciplinary mechanism of sport by submitting the fans to “willfully” participate in the system that governs them.

These observations bring us to our point regarding the ways fan behaviors are normalized and governed through the interplay between freedom and rule. While the fans in the stand are observed and mandated to observe the rules, these rules are also becoming more and more tailored to work around individual taste and preference as they willfully and “freely” go about attending, consuming, cheering, and moving around at the stadium. The “dividualized” manner with which the attendees (fans and players) are seen at the stadium, exemplified in the ASU project to estimate wait times at concession stands and restrooms using computational visual analysis, affords infinite flexibility to the system that feeds off of allowing movement and actions of the fans, from which it can scoop data and learn their patterns that in turn can be used to regulate and optimize their actions. Through the mundane mediation of the interplay between freedom and rule as a built-in feature of the stadium, the rule adapts to the differential contexts and acquires parametric and processual quality, instead of being conditioned by a rigid binary opposition (Klauser et al., 2014).

Hence, the proponents’ claim to enhance the fan experience through data is undermined by the complex power dynamic of a sporting landscape that deploys the same techniques to govern them at a distance. And to be sure, the complexity of this power dynamic affects broad sociotechnical landscapes of sport across the institutional arrangement baked into the prevalent regime of innovation, wherein the fans and their privacy are not the only victim. The real risk here is the entrenchment of “innovation” as the default solution to address all the societal problems, as a tech critic Morozov (2013) asserts, from national security, job creation, to sustainable development. The hazard of such unilateral and solutionist manner in which the innovation justifies current changes is not only that it makes it easier for tech corporations to monetize the fan experiences, but also that it obscures the inherent disciplinary workings of power, thereby limiting our imaginations about what the future of sport would look like outside of the techno-capitalist regime of innovation.

Conclusion

In this article, we took a holistic perspective to map the multiple sociotechnical mediations around the smart stadium. We have interwoven into our analysis several past and ongoing changes that paralleled the ASU’s smart stadium initiative, including the entrepreneurial model of the public research university, the new sport business model based on data analytics, and the proliferating digital technologies that pervade the stadium space and set invisible parameters of “normalcy.” As the mandate of smartness and innovation enters the space of stadium, sport games are increasingly viewed as a data repository and a testing ground for technologies for smart cities. We considered how this process was legitimated by the narratives of innovation and fan experience enhancement, which neglected the securitizing and normalizing aspects of the same process. While acknowledging the fans’ recent attempts to resist big data sport’s technological apparatus (Hutchins, 2016b), we wanted to examine the complex and spatialized ways in which these techniques have evolved to work around, or regardless of, individual agency. Overall, the smart stadium marks a crucial conjuncture in the history of mediasport in which technology, innovation, sport, and the fans are continuously tested and improved in new ways, thus reconfiguring the power dynamics in which stadium attendees exercise their freedom within the flexibilizing limits of rule.

The argument we introduce in our article lays the groundwork for future studies on the smart stadium that attends to the broad sociotechnical mediations around sport. One way to reframe our future debates around the smart stadium is to explore how, in different local and global contexts, the dominant technocratic vision that privileges the entrepreneurial dynamism and techno-solutionism is articulated and challenged differently. One could look into how exactly the techniques and ethos of governing population set up the “parameters of normalcy” reflecting the context of the distinct locations and what types of spatial and sensory data are collected and analyzed. In these observations, a broad perspective could be adopted to show how sport affects, and is constituted by, nonsporting social goals and power arrangements around education, health and safety, and research and development. For instance, it could trace the sociotechnical connections around smart virtual and augmented reality technologies that would further blur the boundary between the actual and mediated experience of sport and unsettle the conventional sociological notions of structure, agency, and privacy, particularly as stadium operators navigate through the installment of the post-pandemic “new normalcy” and its impact on future stadium experience.