This article examines the myriad ways in which RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology will impact the world of sports. In this paper, we look at how this “weird new media revolution” will have a transformative impact both on the games themselves and the fans’ experience at the stadium. We will examine how RFID is being used in sport applications from golf to soccer to racing of all forms to add previously unimaginable real-time richness and accuracy to the sports. We will also look at the use of RFID in ticketing and payment applications that will add security, control, and new revenue streams to sports operations, while giving enhanced value and services to the fan. We will conclude with a look at what this new version of Sports 2.0 will mean in the future both in and out of the sporting arena.
Introduction
RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification, and it is poised to be the successor technology to the bar code in identifying “things” in our economy. Using small microchips embedded in objects, RFID can create unimaginable levels of control and visibility in a whole host of applications. Evidence of such can be seen in the mandates of major retailers, such as Wal-Mart, Target, and Albertson’s, along with the U.S. Department of Defense, to have their suppliers begin affixing RFID-enabled labels to shipments of goods to their distribution centers (Morphy, 2005, n.p.). As outlined in Table 1, RFID is currently being employed in a whole host of areas.
| Traditional RFID Applications | Emerging RFID Applications |
|
|
Source: Wyld (2006, p. 159)
Take golf balls for example. Anyone who has picked-up a golf club has been there. You hit your drive off the 1st tee, and it goes, and goes, and goes – where? All golfers have spent countless hours combing the banks of creeks, looking in crevices, and pouring through thickets in often fruitless searches for their wayward shots. But what if there was a high-tech way for the ball to tell you where it was and guide you to it? Radar Golf is a small company, based in Roseville, California, seeking to RFID-enable the game of golf with its Radar Golf System. Such a prospect led Stephanie Stahl (2005), the editor of InformationWeek, to say that finding lost golf balls may be the “killer app” for RFID in the consumer world.
Radar Golf has developed a golf ball that is manufactured by a Chinese contractor that has an RFID tag embedded inside its core. The ball has been certified as conforming to the rigorous standards of the United States Golf Association (USGA), enabling it to be used in tournament play. The company’s patented Ball Positioning System (BPS) is built into a handheld unit, which is essentially an RFID reader that transmits a specific radio frequency signal to search for the lost ball. It provides a visual LCD signal strength display and pulsed audio tone feedback to the golfer looking for his/her ball, with the beep increasing (like a Geiger counter) as the golfer nears the location of the wayward ball. The BPS presently has a detection range of up to 100 feet (LaPedus, 2005). The company began marketing the system in mid-2005. The Radar Golf System retails for $249, which includes a dozen golf balls (additional dozen balls sets retail for $39). It plans to license the technology to other golf ball manufacturers to equip their branded balls with RFID tags (LaPedus, 2005).
We are seeing that, as with the golf ball example, games themselves can be enhanced through the use of RFID technology. We are also seeing that RFID can be used to secure ticketing and enhance the in-stadium spectator experience. RFID can also create new metrics – and new gambling opportunities – in the sports world. In this article, we will take a look at Sports 2.0, as RFID helps reshape the sporting life and experience.
RFID on the Field
RFID is fast getting “in the game,” as we are seeing exciting, in-event applications of RFID technology in sports ranging from the “beautiful game” to road racing of every form.
Football (Soccer)
Indeed, the most noteworthy in-game example to date comes in the world’s most popular sport – football (or soccer as we in the U.S. know it). The Erlangen, Germany-based Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits has developed an RFID-based system to give complete visibility to the soccer field. Both the ball and a shin-guard on each of the twenty-two players are outfitted with RFID-chips, and readers positioned to scan the entire field can read the position of both the players and the “Smartball” up to two thousand times each second. The Fraunhofer system will not only allow for referees to consult the data to potentially aid in correctly calling disputed goals and troublesome off-sides penalties, but it will permit soccer clubs and their fans to access performance metrics on their teams and individual players. Although FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association), soccer’s world governing body, passed on using the technology for the 2006 World Cup, the system is likely to be approved for tournament use later this year (Collins, 2005).
Racing
We have also seen that RFID can add value and visibility to racing events of all types. One of the longest standing applications of RFID has been in the area of marathon racing. The ChampionChip Company pioneered the use of RFID-chips attached to runners in the Berlin Marathon in 1994. Since then, the firm’s namesake tracking device has been worn by millions of road racers, cyclists, in-line skaters, cross-country skiers, and triathletes in thousands of events worldwide. The tracking device, which uses passive RFID technology with antennas built into specially-designed mats over which the athletes must pass, allows for the racers’ real, net times to be recorded as they pass the start-finish and other intervals along the course, as well as the “value-add” of for real-time tracking via the Internet for friends, fans, press, and family members. It has been used in the New York City Marathon, where five thousand runners per minute crossed the thirty-six meters-wide starting line at the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. And in the June 2000 Broloppet Half Marathon, in which runners raced across the new bridge connecting between Denmark and Sweden, a record 79,837 competitors were tracked using the ChampionChip (ChampionChip, 2006). Commenting on the state of marathon technology, Judith Donohue, manager of the HP’s New England Initiative, whose firm has worked with the Boston Marathon for over a decade, observed: “We've come a long way from when we used to draw a line in the street with chalk” (quoted in Ewalt, 2004, n.p.).
RFID has moved into a motor racing. Texas Instruments has developed the Race Timer system for motorcycle racing, in which an RFID transponder is placed either on the motorcycle’s front fender or in the rider's chest protector. The system is a quantum improvement over the former use of single-file gates and either manual recording or scanning bar codes attached to riders’ helmets. With the TI system, the size of motorcycle events can grow significantly, supporting up to one thousand riders in a single event (Texas Instruments, 2005). RFID has also been adopted by the IRL (Indy Racing League), with active transponders being positioned in the same point in the nose of the Indy Car and with antennas positioned around – and in – the track. With speeds of over two-hundred miles per hour, the system can distinguish between two or more racecars passing the same point within 10,000ths of a second of each other. The system allows for real-time race tracking via the Internet for all IRL races, including the Indianapolis 500, where antennas are installed in the track surface in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s famous Yard of Bricks at the start-finish line of the “Old Brickyard” as the track is known (Karle, 2004).
While NASCAR has not announced a similar in-race system, the fast-growing racing circuit is employing RFID for tracking tires used by all racing teams in its three racing circuits. The system will enable for centralized control over the Goodyear tires used in NASCAR events, in order to allow for an even playing field between the race teams and better control over tire stock (Anonymous, 2005). RFID also presents a very practical advantage over the former bar-code based labeling of tires for NASCAR events. Goodyear had in the past attempted to track tire inventory for race teams by applying bar code labels to the sidewalls. However, they quickly found that the bar code labels could be intentionally rubbed off or smudged when in use (Sullivan, 2005). With the new system, the tire inventory is centralized by NASCAR, and race officials can use handheld readers to quickly scan both cars and the pits to make sure they have the proper quantity and type of tires in their possession before, during, and after the races (Swedberg, 2005).
Finally, in a slower speed form of racing, RFID has been introduced in the ancient sport of pigeon racing. In the past, to determine timing and ranking in pigeon races, handlers had to catch pigeons one-by-one and read an identification number from metal rings attached to their legs. Today, the standard practice for almost a decade has been to attach RFID-enabled plastic bands to the birds’ legs with the positioning of antennas at points along the course from the release point to the home loft (Anonymous, 1997).
RFID in the Arena
RFID-enabled Paper Ticketing
There have been exciting developments recently to integrating RFID chips into a paper-form ticket. Doing so has several advantages, including:
The recently concluded FIFA World Cup in Germany was the largest use of RFID in sports ticketing to date, with:
FIFA had previously employed RFID-equipped tickets in its “dry run” for the 2006 event in staging its Confederations Cup in Germany in 2005 (Blau, 2006b).
The World Cup ticketing was based on Philips Electronics MIFARE technology, enabling ticket-holders to gain entrance to the venues by sliding their tickets into fixed scanners, positioned at the entry gates to the stadiums. As can be seen in Figure 1, the tickets are personalized with the name of the ticket buyer. While FIFA collects identification information on all ticket buyers, the RFID tag does not contain info on the ticket holder, only access information for the FIFA ticketing system (Stensgaard, 2006).
Figure 1 – World Cup Tickets

Besides security concerns, one of the principal reasons FIFA chose to
employ RFID-based security in its ticketing for the World Cup was out
the organizer’s desire to significantly cut down on the secondary
or “black market” for these highly coveted tickets, which
FIFA prohibits from sale or transfer outside of family members except
in cases of undue hardship (Blau, 2006b). According to Carrie Johnson,
an e-commerce analyst for Forrester Research, the size of the global secondary-ticket
market is difficult to precisely pin down, with projections ranging anywhere
from $2 to $25 billion annually (cited in Sandoval, 2006). While World
Cup tickets for this year’s event averaged approximately a $180
face value, one estimate from the United Kingdom projected that FIFA leaves
as much as $3.6 billion (US) on the table by not charging market rates
for tickets (Blau, 2006a). FIFA’s prohibition on illegal ticket
sales, whether by what are known as “ticket brokers,” “scalpers,”
or “touts” by region, has not stopped those engaged in the
banned practice from trying to sell tickets. In fact, bids rose to $3000
or more per seat on eBay for World Cup tickets, even though the buyer
had no assurance they could actually enter the venue with a ticket, the
name on which could not possibly match the ticket holder (Kelly, 2006).
Buyers were betting on the fact that gate personnel would not bother checking
the ticket holder’s ID to match the name on the ticket to the person
presenting it at the turnstile – a bet lost by some fans, according
to media reports from the game sites. One sports industry analyst stated
that better control over the pricing of tickets brings FIFA additional
worldwide revenues in areas such as licensing, sponsorship, and broadcast
rights through marketing the World Cup as a “people’s game,”
rather than as entertainment for the wealthy and powerful (Higgitt, 2006).
Still, it is not a fool-proof system, as even one member of the FIFA Executive
Committee, Ismail Bhamjee of Botswana, was asked to leave Germany during
the World Cup when it was discovered that he had sold match tickets for
the England versus Trinidad and Tobago game for more than three times
their face value (Anonymous, 2006a).
Certainly, preventing counterfeit tickets from being presented at the turnstile is a concern of any promoter of a sporting event – from one as large as the World Cup, as pricey as the Super Bowl, or for hosts of professional sports events and even prestigious amateur competitions, such as college football games and skating championships. For instance, at this year’s Super Bowl XL in Detroit, local police arrested twelve people on felony charges for selling counterfeit Super Bowl tickets, and seventy-three bogus tickets were confiscated from people who tried to enter Detroit’s Ford Field on the day of the game (Anonymous, 2006b).
How can RFID help to curb counterfeiting? In November 2005, Texas Instrument’s Tag-It RFID inlays were embedded into all 100,000 tickets for the Tennis Master’s Cup 2005, held in Shanghai, China. The event organizers used sixteen stationary readers at the entrance gates to Shanghai’s Qi Zhong stadium, which is slated to host the event for three consecutive years through 2007. As Yang Yibin, Deputy General Manager of New Sports and Entertainment (Shanghai) Ltd., a subsidiary of the Ba-Shi Group, explained: “Prior to using RFID, spectators were required to purchase a pre-event ticket holder and then exchange it for the physical ticket at the stadium box office. This new system not only offers peace of mind that the tickets purchased are genuine, it puts tickets in the purchaser's hands faster and provides more efficient entry come event time” (quoted in O’Connor, 2005b, n.p.). In addition to the gate verification of the ticket, New Sports and Entertainment outfitted event staff members with handheld RFID readers to spot check tickets inside the stadium for an added level of security (O’Connor, 2005b).
Many of the best practices and lessons learned emerging from the FIFA World Cup and other high profile events will be employed at the next global sports event on the horizon at which organizers plan to use RFID-based ticketing - the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics (Campbell, 2005).
RFID-enabled Smart Cards - The “Golden Ticket”?
The hybrid solution of RFID-enabled, paper-form tickets may be a short-term solution to the problems of crowd control, security, and resale prevention. Indeed, the longer-term solution may be a move away from hard copy tickets entirely to an electronic “Golden Ticket,” – a smart card solution that offers benefits in both ticketing and payments.
That is the vision of a number of competing firms today. Stadiacard, a division of the UK-based TelCo Management Limited, is working with several leading football clubs in the UK in proving the viability of such a contactless card solution. Most notably, there is the example of the Liverpool Football Club, which has been at the forefront of using contactless technology in its stadium since 2003. For the upcoming 2006/2007 season, the Liverpool Club, winners of the 2006 FA Cup, will be shifting its season ticket buyers entirely to Stadiacard’s contactless solution, providing them with what they are branding as the Fan Card. Liverpool has now equipped its historic Anfield Stadium, which dates back to 1884, with readers at all of its entry gates. The Liverpool Club believes that the system will not only speed entry of season ticket holders into the stadium, but also eliminate the possibility that these buyers could resell individual game tickets from their season-long package or provide them to “ticket touters.” This is because the Fan Card will be required for entry throughout the season. If sold, the season ticket purchaser would lose the right to enter the stadium for not just a single match or series of games, but the remainder of the season. While Anfield only has a capacity of 45,400 seats, the Liverpool club has issued over 130,000 Fan Cards to date. Supporters who are not season ticket holders can use their Fan Cards as ID when purchasing individual game tickets via the phone or the Internet (Stadiacard, 2006).
A similar solution, also aimed for the football market, is being marketed by the St. Andrews, Scotland-based Scotcomms Technology Group. Scotcomms TeamCard contactless solution is being employed by several leading football clubs in the UK, including:
One of the significant benefits of such contactless ticketing is the ability of the sports’ team/club to derive incremental revenue from what would have been unused tickets by season ticket holders. One of the British football clubs making use of the TeamCard, the Bolton Wanderers, has turned a season ticket holder’s inability to attend a game into a “win-win” for all parties. Gareth Moores, a director of the club, estimates that 5-8% of season ticket holders can not attend a given game. The Bolton Club rewards season ticket holders who notify the organization in advance of their inability to attend a game with £10 worth of points loaded onto their TeamCard. These points can then be used for purchasing either refreshments in the club’s stadium or team merchandise from the club. The club is then able to resell that unused seat – for an average profit of £15. Likewise, football clubs have begun to offer seating upgrades to better sections on an availability bases to card holders, with the ability to charge their registered payment option immediately should they choose to sit in a better seat for an event (Thomas, 2004).
There is also a significant security benefit to the use of contactless tickets for sporting events in general and for football specifically. Unlike with paper-form tickets, if a fan’s ticket card is lost or stolen, the team can simply issue a replacement and cancel out the original lost item. Also, the team retains significant control over the use of the card, which is especially important in venues such as football in England, where crowd rowdiness and hooliganism has been of paramount concern in recent years. If a team can identify trouble making fans, they can simply deactivate that person’s contactless ticket card and ban them from the grounds. In the same fashion, as has been done in Liverpool since the 2003/2004 season, stadium security and support personnel have themselves been issued contactless cards, allowing for the club to maintain required staffing levels throughout the stadium and monitor staff movement for both management and payroll purposes. Finally, since the fan’s card also operates as a form of payment in the stadium, the benefits of contactless payments at concessions and merchandise sales locations can be reaped. And, in the United Kindgom, unlike at sports venues in the United States, where sports betting is not legal in the stadium setting, fans can place wagers before and even during games using the same contactless ticket card (Scotcomms Technology Group, 2006; Stadiacard, 2006; and Thomas, 2004).
Michael Richardson, Chief Technology Officer of New York-based Smart System Technologies (SST), points to the fact that professional sports teams “have to look for new ways to raise incremental revenues beyond selling seats” (quoted in Collins, 2004, n.p.). Contactless payment technologies, integrating RFID into either credit cards or key fobs, may indeed be the key to unlocking more revenue potential from fans inside the stadium. Early trials of such systems have been promising. In one pilot, fans using the PowerPass system of New York-based Smart System Technologies (SST) consistently bought double the amount of brewskis, hot dogs, foam fingers, and other concession items, while speeding the transactions (between two and six times faster than cash or credit card) and taking cash-handling out of the equation (Collins, 2004).
This season, Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers have worked in partnership with Chase to provide their fans with the convenience of contactless payment technology. During the 2005 season, only one concession stand at Ameriquest Field in Arlington, Texas was even equipped to accept credit-card payments. For this season, the Rangers have installed more than two-hundred contactless credit-card terminals throughout the ballpark, at a cost of approximately $150 each. According to Scott Rau, a Senior Vice President for Chase, contactless cards can take thirty seconds off the time required for each cash transaction. Thus, fans can speed through the process of buying concessions and souvenirs in the stadium, enhancing the spectator experience by reducing their time waiting in lines and not enjoying the event. Rangers Vice President Brad Alberts is excited about the new technology, believing “it's easier for the fans, it's quicker for the fans, and people will probably spend more money” (quoted in Koenig, 2006, n.p.). The system is expected to grow in use as Chase distributes more of its branded credit cards with contactless payment capabilities. As of June, the company has distributed over seven-million of their “blink” cards in major metropolitan areas in the U.S., including the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, home of the Texas Rangers (Koenig, 2006).
At present, MasterCard is undoubtedly the leader in the field. MasterCard’s PayPass technology has been implemented to date in a total of nine Major League Baseball ballparks and seven National Football League stadiums (Anonymous, 2006c). These current installations are detailed in Table 2 below.
Table 2 - Stadiums in the United Stateswith PayPass Installations
| Major League Baseball | National Football League |
|
|
Source Info: MasterCard International – June 2006
From the perspective of Lawrence Flanagan, Worldwide Chief Marketing Officer for MasterCard International, “stadiums represent the ideal venues to showcase the promise of PayPass,” which the firm is fast-expanding in its credit card operations (quoted in Anonymous, 2006c, n.p.).
What’s the next level for contactless payments? Well, it can be found in Atlanta’s Philips Arena. In a test that began earlier this year, 250 season ticket holders of the Atlanta Thrashers NHL hockey team and the Atlanta Hawks NBA basketball team are receiving a specially NFC (near field communication)-enabled Nokia cell phone which they can then use in the arena for concession payments. Moreover, the cell phones can detect the passive RFID tags embedded in “smart posters” positioned around Philips Arena. With the phone held within a few inches of the poster, they can download news, graphics (such as pictures of players or wallpaper images) and promotional video clips which are presently inaccessible by the general public (O’Connor, 2005c). According to a recently released study from Philips Electronics and Visa International on the utility of Near Field Communication (NFC) and contactless payment technology, consumers like the convenience, ease of use, and "coolness" of making transactions with their mobile phones (Philips Semiconductors, 2006).
Analysis
Will RFID be “the next big thing?” At this point in the technology’s life cycle, it is too early for anyone to tell, but the stars certainly seem to be in alignment for the next decade to be a tremendously exciting one. Many share the sentiment of Kuchinskas (2005) that: “RFID will change business and society as much as cell phones and the Internet have” (n.p.). Futurist Paul Saffo believes that we are in the early stages of “a weird new kind of media revolution,” in that “RFID will make possible new companies that do things we don't even dream about” (quoted in Van, 2005, B1). Saffo views RFID as a media technology, making it possible for what he categorizes as “’smartifacts’ or intelligent artifacts, that are observing the world on our behalf and increasingly manipulating it on our behalf.” Saffo thus stresses the importance of thinking outside the box on RFID and looking beyond today’s problems to find “unexpected applications,” which is where “the greatest potential for RFID lies” (quoted in O’Connor, 2005a, n.p.).
Today, we are seeing the first fruits of this “weird” new media revolution that RFID is sparking, including those found in the sports field. What we are seeing with the advent of RFID in the sports marketplace is the introduction of a technology that has the power to transform the experience of playing and watching games. Sports 2.0 promises to be an exciting – and richer – experience, and it will be interesting to observe the innovations that will surely come over the next few years as RFID-based applications become more commonplace in sporting venues.
What does all this portend for the “Average Joe Six-Pack” sports fan? As a player, as a coach, as a spectator, and as a gambler, RFID is on tap to transform the sports world over the next decade. We will see RFID-based systems replace some of the fundamental rule elements of sports, to the betterment of the game. After all, it is hard to believe that in 2006, the way we measure first downs in football is with a chain! We may also see the automation of some routine scoring and statistics compiled in major sporting events, such as line crossings in a wide variety of sports and distance calculations in golf. RFID will also bring heretofore unimaginable levels of information and intelligence to our games. Already, there is speculation that RFID may enable new forms of wagering on sporting events with the new metrics that can be uncovered by RFID-chipping of balls and players, making new opportunities for casinos and sports books. In baseball for instance, RFID could enable gamblers to bet on things – in real-time – like the precise distance of a home run and the positioning of individual pitches. Finally, there is speculation that some players and teams may not want to release such new statistics, such as how far they ran during a soccer or football game, for fear of revealing efforts that they may not be especially proud of. This is hardly information overload; it’s revolutionary on many, many levels.
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Van, Jon (2005). “RFID spells media revolution, futurist says.” Chicago Tribune, 124(104) (April 16, 2005): B1.
Wyld, David (2006). “RFID 101: The next big thing for management.” Management Research News, 29(4): 154-173.
For a detailed and highly readable look at RFID technology, please consult the following report: Wyld, David C. (2005) RFID: The right frequency for government, A research monograph published by The IBM Center for the Business of Government, Washington, DC, October 2005. Retrieved October 23, 2005, from http://www.businessofgovernment.org/main/publications/grant_reports/details/index.asp?gid=232.