The Way People Enjoy Professional Sport Is Changing Dramatically

Once upon a time, if you supported the local team, then your options were fairly limited. You could go along to the matches, then retire to a bar to relax with your fellow supporters as you rehashed the finer details of the match.

You would then wait for the next week, perhaps with a few pieces in the local paper, the match report and a brief rundown of results from the rest of the league. Whatever your chosen sport, this was pretty much the only way to engage with it: attendance and reading the press.

How times have changed, huh?

It’s no longer necessary to attend a sporting event to see it. In fact, it’s no longer necessary to even have a particular team to support - there is always a match, always some sport, being broadcast from anywhere around the world.

Now we can watch curling at 2am or find ourselves engrossed in the latest goings on from the soccer Scottish Premier League - despite living thousands of miles away. Sport is no longer a weekly activity; there’s now more information to consume, discussions to be had, than we could ever possibly have the time for.

So if our engagement with sport has already changed so much in relatively little time, that’s something worth reflecting on. Not only does it give us an idea of the current picture as a whole, but also means we can look forward and consider the changes that are still to come. The way we engage with professional sport couldn’t be more different, starting with…

1. Specific Streaming Sites 

 No longer do you have to buy a cable subscription and just hope the match you want to see is being broadcast. If you’re a fan of an NFL team, you can go to a match, or you can cough up for an NFL Game Pass that lets you watch whatever match you want online.

If WWE is more your thing, you have the option to find Headline Tickets here, but for whatever you can’t attend there’s the WWE Network. These are just two examples; UFC, for example, also has a specific streaming service - and more are sure to follow suit.

These specific sites sound like a good idea, but there’s no doubt they have massively changed the way we watch those specific sports. The more that online platforms specialize, the more expensive it’s going to be to watch them all. While you might have more choice within a single sport, there’s going to be less choice for a variety of sports.

While that might work out well if you only really follow one sport, for those of us that like a wide variety of different options, we’re going to find our choices significantly narrowed. Is this a good thing? Time will tell - but the popularity of the single-focus streaming sites is suggesting this is very much the way of the future.

2. Anti-Scalping Measures 

 Buying tickets in the 21st century is a totally different experience from days gone by. No longer do you have to queue up outside the ticket box in bad weather, desperately hoping there’s still going to be decent tickets left by the time you get to the front of the queue.

Now, you just have to sit refreshing a ticket website and hoping the server is going to be able to withstand the strain of thousands of people doing the same thing.

One thing hasn’t changed, however; scalping. Of course, scalping has updated somewhat - it’s now done online through eBay and other sites, but it’s the same tactic for a digital age. However, it’s become more and more complicated for scalpers to do their work.

Tickets are now printed with the name of the person who bought them, which sounds good, but can be very frustrating if someone buys a ticket in good faith but then cannot attend - selling them on is nigh-on impossible.

In fact, anti-scalping measures have been criticized by concert goers for making it more difficult to get into gigs, the same measures that are causing issues for sports fans. There’s no doubt that scalping should be resisted, but it seems the current trend is also going to penalize honest attendees - which is perhaps not the best response.

3. Safety 

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 When you actually get to a sports event, it’s going to be safer for you than ever before.

After the Hillsborough disaster in the UK - in which 96 people were crushed to death during a football match - crowd control became a focus for sports arenas the world over.

Crowd control is now seen as a science, which is applied rigorously at any good arena. There is always a chance of a further incident, as more recent tragedies in Africa have shown, but it’s far less likely than it’s ever been before.

Due in no small part to the backlash against the English football hooligans of the 1980s and 90s,
there’s another aspect of safety that modern sports fans can take advantage of: facial recognition.

In the past, if a troublesome person was banned from an arena, then they could still obtain entry fairly easily. This is no longer possible, thanks to cameras on turnstiles and tickets becoming more and more electronic in nature. So if you’re heading to a sports event, you can be confident the most problematic sections of the crowd have already been restricted.

It’s also becoming more and more common to see alcohol banned from stadiums, which in turn helps to improve crowd behavior and overall safety. Given that sports events should be a family-friendly event, this is definitely a development that most of us can embrace.

What Does The Future Hold?

It seems that the current trends will make it more difficult to attend sporting events, but also far safer when you get there. For anyone who just wants to have a good time and see some spectacular sport, that’s probably a good thing.

Complicated doesn’t have to mean unnavigable, and anything that helps keeps violence and scalpers under control is to be appreciated. The only downside is the reliance on individual streaming services for each sport, which could get expensive - but at least the match-day experience is set to improve.