As biometrics infiltrate the fan experience, will anyone challenge Wicket at the game?

In terms of biometric use cases, security, privacy and fraud prevention are all good – but what if you just want to get a beer and watch the game? Face biometrics for everything from ticketing to concessions to merch is on the horizon for most major sports leagues. And while Wicket is not the only player on the field, they are certainly the one currently posting the best stats.

Founded in 2020 as a pandemic startup focused on getting Cleveland Browns fans into games safely, Wicket has grown quickly into a leader in using biometrics to enhance fan experience. The Browns pilot progressed into a permanent deployment, which spread to a few other stadiums. This NFL season, all 30 of the league’s venues will be using biometrics for credentialing and access control. It is the first league-wide rollout for Wicket, but still just the tip of the iceberg: the company now works with every major sports league (on some level) and is pushing ahead into conferences, concerts and other live events.

Speaking at Identity Week in Washington this week, Wicket’s Chief Operating Officer Jeff Boehm says the company’s success stems from its commitment to the sports and live event space, and its parallel commitment to protecting fans’ privacy.

It’s important, he says, that the company’s biometric system for fans is opt-in and that it is “very intentional” about how the system is used, and transparent about the trade-off. “We are very overt about this, saying you havse a choice: if you want the convenience of getting into the stadium faster, you can get your concessions faster, you can opt-in,” Boehm says.

The data Wicket collects, however, does not belong to the company, but rather to the teams and/or venues. “At the end of the day it’s their customers, so they are the ones that own that relationship with the individual fans,” Beohm says. “We are the data stewards, enabling them to provide a service. But that’s their data.”

And what will teams do with it? Nothing, says Brandon Covert, vice president of information technology of the Cleveland Browns. The deal is clear-cut: biometrics are for fan experience, and nothing else. “We are never gonna sell this data, we are never gonna share this data,” Covert says. Although the Browns’ marketing teams have asked if they can have access to the data for targeting, the team has been steadfast in saying no. Covert says that it’s an opportunity for sports teams to set an example. “With sports, we want to be a beacon that says, we’re going to protect this data to the utmost level.”

The plan appears to be working. The program started in 2020 with a meagre amount of people opting-in; Covert says maybe 15 fans made the choice. But with every game, biometric entry gained popularity. Covert estimates they had 6,000 registrations by the end of the first year. Now, as the 2024 NFL season kicks off, they have 38,500. And early reports suggest the concessions program was a huge hit at the Browns’ recent home opener.

Nor is it just the NFL. Although Major League Baseball has engaged NEC to provide biometrics for its Go-Ahead Entry program, most of the other leagues are using Wicket: both the U.S. Open and Australian Open tennis tournaments used the company’s biometrics this year, as well as an Aussie rules football team.

Then there is soccer. Christian Lau, CTO of the Los Angeles Football Club (an early adopter of biometrics) says Wicket’s system has proven popular with the team’s young fan demographic. Like a few other teams across the sporting landscape, LA FC initially explored biometrics with Clear – but having observed how Wicket was working for the Browns, soon made the switch. “We’ve tested ticketing since the end of last year, and will be rolling it out en masse in 2025” Lau says. “Every entrance into BMO stadium will have opt-in face identity for all guests.”

LA FC also has big plans for face-based merch, food and alcohol sales, specifically using Wicket in tandem with POS product Mashgin, a self-service system using an optical reader to identify items purchased, enabling customers to pay with their faces. By combining facial recognition with, say, hot dog recognition, the fan experience starts to get close to Wicket CEO Alastair Partington’s vision of being able to go from your car to your seat on game day without taking anything out of your pocket.

The club also has plans to integrate California’s new mDL program into the system, so mDLs can be used for onboarding to Wicket and other use cases. Lau says BMO stadium will be the reference stadium for Apple for mDL deployment.

So far, technical glitches are less of an issue than headstrong humans. Covert says that “Sunday, with our home opener against Dallas, was not a good football game for us on the field, but we did extremely well with the credentialing, with no misidentifications on game day.” He also notes that the opt-out rate for the program is ridiculously low: in four years, the team has had four fans opt out.

As fans warm up to line-ups made quicker and experiences made richer by biometrics, more digital ID firms are likely to take note. For now, although the aforementioned NEC program has cornered MLB and Clear still kicking at a few old cans, Wicket is ahead of the pack, boasting 1.5 million entrances into venues over the past 5 years. With a strong foothold on sports and a solid start in the conference space with deployments at events such as Salesforce Dreamforce, by the time others get in the game, Wicket may already be at the ten-yard line, well positioned to dominate the field for the foreseeable future.

Article Topics

access control  |  biometric payments  |  biometric ticketing  |  face biometrics  |  facial authentication  |  MLS  |  NFL  |  Wicket