What's Next?

Despite having worked in sports strategy and analytics for five years (with a stop at business school in between), I had never been to the famous MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference before this year.  What was once ~100 sitting in a conference room talking about advances stats metrics has ballooned into a 2,700+ person event attended by everyone from team owners, presidents and GMs to college students and weird people obsessed with the likes of Bill James and John Hollinger.  While the conference was once all about sabermetrics and statistics like WAR and BABIP, now the event is as much about using analytics and technology to provide more value to fans and, in turn, generate more revenue to teams and leagues.  While I learned a lot of helpful professional insights from my two days at the Boston convention center, I wanted to share a few tidbits from the conference on what sports analytics will soon mean to all of us as sports fans.

NBA COO Adam Silver speaks on a panel alongside Patriots owner Jonathan Kraft and ESPN's John Skipper.

• Get ready for in-venue WiFi: If you've gone to a professional sporting event recently, you probably noticed that the cell phone coverage ranged from mediocre to awful - a ton of people confined in relatively small space simultaneously reaching for their phones doesn't lead to fast downloads or good call quality.  Teams and leagues are now investing millions of dollars to build out in-venue WiFi to combat this issue.  This not only means that you'll be able to post videos to Facebook during a game, but also that teams will be able to use the internet to offer you a host of new products.  In-seat concessions ordering from your phone, the ability to upgrade your seats (for a fee) via mobile and near-real-time highlights delivered to your second screen are all on the horizon.

• Customization is coming: If you've ever looked at the back of your ticket stub, you probably noticed an offer to redeem your ticket for something - a six-inch Subway sandwich or 15% off one item at Modell's Sporting Goods, perhaps.  You also probably noticed that the offer you got wasn't for something you actually want.  As teams move to digital ticketing and use technology to learn more about their fans, however, they will have the ability to target specific offers to specific groups of people, increasing the likelihood that you'll get something that has value to you.  Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all promos - while all of the customization might seem a big Big Brother-ish at first, fans will soon come to love having their sporting event experience customized.

• Say goodbye to paper tickets: Every year, ticket cards and mobile ticketing become more and more prevalent in sports.  In an effort to curb brokers and the secondary market, teams are moving towards non-paper tickets to better monitor who actually comes to games (it's not always the person who purchased the ticket from the team, as we know from the rapid growth of StubHub's business) and protect fans from potential fraud.  Whether it's linked to a separate card, a credit card or a mobile application, the days of paper tickets are coming to an end for anything other than souvenir / commemorative purposes.

There's a lot more coming our way over the next few years, but these were a few of the more interesting trends that emerged from the 2013 MIT Sloan conference.  While change is almost always met with resistance at first, I think most fans with quickly come to appreciate all of the changes coming our way.  Each sports fan is unique - it's about time teams started treating us like it.