These days, it takes a bit too long to get into a soccer game. Waiting in lines, fumbling for tickets, flicking through emails - confirmations, barcodes, account verifications - all that time wasted just to enter the arena, time that should be spent on those precious pre-match rituals.
Jeff Boehm agrees, and the COO of Wicket has fans' backs.
His solution? Ditch the tickets. Use your face instead. His startup is just one of a handful of new companies that Major League Soccer is working with in the latest iteration of its Innovation Lab - a forward-thinking program launched by the league to bring new technologies into the game.
“Fans want the best possible game on the field, the best players playing for their club. And they also want the best experience however they are interacting with the game,” Chris Schlosser, MLS SVP of Emerging Ventures told GOAL.
MLS introduced six new companies in its second iteration of the program. The idea is for them to be implemented at any level of soccer in the U.S. Some will go straight into MLS, while others will be used in lower divisions - or even youth tournaments.
And that’s what the companies brought into the innovation lab aim to do - albeit in slightly different ways. All of them went through nine months of testing, and all target various aspects of the game.
One of them, Lubu, uses AI-powered cleat insiders that - in a very complicated way - can measure athlete performance and accurately predict fatigue. The goal, ultimately, is to prevent injuries before they happen in real time.
But there are perhaps two major concepts that fans can truly connect with. The first is Wicket. It has actually been in the space for a while. Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, facial authentication - not recognition, Boehm stresses - speeds up the various processes that slow down the in person fan experience.
It’s simple, really. You take a picture of yourself on an app, connect it to the platform and it is then dissolved into a sequence of otherwise unintelligible numbers. But look into an iPad at a gate or concession stand that has the app installed, and your face is recognized. No need for wallets, printed tickets, passwords or QR codes. In effect, fans can simply skip the line.
“Your face is your ticket, your face is your ID, your face is your credit card,” Boehm said. “It’s speeding up all of those points of friction.”
The technology has been piloted at a few venues. The NFL’s Cleveland Browns adopted it on a trial basis in 2021. Some MLB teams use it. In MLS, Columbus Crew, Atlanta United and LAFC have all used it.
For LAFC, the results for fans have been encouraging.
“We’ve done some ticketing, we’ve done some purchase and concessions work together… it just makes that the process so much easier,” Boehm said.
And the league itself is expanding the program to stadiums around the country, on an opt-in basis.
“Getting into a stadium, getting two beers and a hot dog and sitting down is a challenge because of the queues,” Schlosser said. “If we can make those queues easier and faster, while still maintaining all of the security protocols, that’s an interesting one.”
And then, there’s the more interactive elements. Edge Sound Research attempts to answer a fairly simple question: what if you could feel like you were a soccer player, all without actually being there?
There are a number of holes in soccer broadcasting, Val Salomaki, CEO of EDGE Sound Research, believes. While camera visuals have become more advanced, audio has largely been left behind.
“Our entire goal for our company is that we can get isolated audio of everything on the pitch - every player, the ball - to give you complete flexibility,” Salomaki said.
EDGE has been playing with this for a while. Salomaki and his company unveiled a successful partnership with the NBA last year, and after a chance meeting at a sports broadcast conference with MLS officials, managed to hash out a deal for implementation in American soccer.
It’s all a part of the evolution of the game, Salomaki says. Audio was first, sound is next. Virtual reality isn’t far away. Yes, there are some challenges to be worked out. Some sounds - perhaps the more colorful language that comes with competitive sport - will need to be edited out.
But that’s a broadcast problem, Salomaki insisted.
“I want you to have the ability to just watch the feed as Messi. That’s the future we’re building towards,” Salomaki said.
The goal, long term, is to improve the quality of the league, and the quality of the fan experience. MLS is not necessarily looking to be a trendsetter or map out a blueprint that the rest of world football flocks to.
Still, MLS has set some precedents. The official announcement of VAR decisions over stadium microphones started in MLS, and later appeared at Copa America. That could be next in Europe or elsewhere. The league’s ground-breaking Apple TV deal, which centralizes all streaming rights in the U.S. for the next 10 years, functions differently to the game in England, Germany and major soccer powers.
Some of the technologies featured in this year’s innovation lab may catch on. All six startups have goals that stretch beyond MLS. There are worldwide ambitions, presumably, at stake. Whether that happens or not, each one is working, in a different way, to improve the game.
“What we’re trying to do,” Schlosser said, “is look down the road.”