Hello and welcome to this segment of Sports Law and Data Analytics. I am Nellie Drew, and I'm here once again with my colleagues, Dr. Bruce, Pitman and Mr. Gerry Meehan. As you may recall during the last segment, we talked about a variety of things, including the regulatory, managerial and legal aspect of running various sports venues and other operations. Today, we're going to go into more detail. Mr. Meehan is going to start us off. Gerry, take it away. Thanks Nellie. Hi Bruce, and welcome to the audience to week four. This week we're going to be talking about sports law and data analytics and multi-event facility enterprises. Let's get started. The introduction. The sports entertainment venue landscape relates to what we call public assembly facilities: outdoor stadiums, meaning football, soccer stadiums, & baseball stadiums. Indoor arenas, which usually involve major league indoor sports hockey and basketball, principally. Entertainment district models which work around the whole idea of creating a whole entertainment zo,ne not just a stand alone facility. Convention centers. University venues for NCAA competition, and local and regional civic venues, which typically, like the Canadian Hockey League model, is usually a mid- smaller facility in midsized cities with a very local audience and facilities of about 5-7,000 people. So that's kind of the landscape. But we're going to be focusing on what we call the multi-event facility enterprise or MEFE as I call them. The typical stadium or arena which represents sports entertainment and convention events to subscribers and the general public in a local community market, major market and major league teams is our focus. Usually managed by the owners of the pro teams or through a proprietary management company or contracted to 3rd party operators under a contract for them to operate and market the facility. Examples are the Toronto Maple Leaf sports entertainment, Scotiabank arena, and obviously Key bank Arena run by Pegula sports and entertainment. The key elements of their operations: facility finance and construction, multiple team operations, facility operations, event planning and presentation, attendance and fan engagement, sponsorship advertising, and customer relationship management, which is a key element of this whole aspect of our activity. Okay, let's take a look at the organizational structure overview for these kinds of companies. Now in courses to follow we'll be showing some very detailed activities of these kinds of organizations. We'll be talking about sports law and the MEFE settings, sports analytics in the same setting, law analytics and management functions as well, and the roles and responsibilities of the management team and the chief executive officer. Let's take a look at this first slide about sports law and analytics with the focus in these three areas; facility planning, financing and construction will be a major topic we cover. Fan engagement, certainly. Event planning again, as I mentioned. Sponsorship and advertising. Media and physical plant and operations. Let's get into financing of the facility and let's ask Professor Drew to comment a little bit on this. We have a history together with arena financing and development in the old Crossroads Arena now called the Key bank Center. At one time in the National Hockey League and most indoor arenas, they were all basically old buildings built during the depression era and more out of their usefulness. Over the years, principally during the 90s, when a whole range of this facility development and construction began to house these professional sports teams. Professor Drew, maybe you have a few comments about that? >> Yes, actually Gerry, I was very fortunate to be part of that wave of construction of new arenas for both NHL & NBA franchises. As you know, before I went in the house to the Buffalo Sabers, I worked with the firm Cohen Swados, which served as outside counsel to the National Hockey League. In that role, I was able to take part in virtually all of the franchise decisions to build, restore, but primarily build, new facilities across the U.S. and Canada. It was an interesting time in part, we always, hypothesized that, this movement was obviously to generate additional revenue sources, right? But in fairness, again, as you mentioned, many of these beautiful gardens, we used to call them right?, like the Memorial Auditorium and the Chicago stadium, great places to watch games for a variety of reasons had really outlived their usefulness in particular because of various logistical concerns. So for example, you know, at one point we were talking about the concept of dark days in the facility, right? Those days, when you don't have an event running and that's important because when you don't event running, you don't have money coming in. So you want to minimize those to the extent feasible. And if you have fewer events that are able to, or interested in, accessing your venue, then you've got a problem. And frequently what we saw in the last years as the Memorial Auditorium waned down, that there were concerns about logistics. In particular, the Memorial Auditorium did not have the capacity to allow semi trucks to drive right onto the floor of the arena and unload and set up. And, and so that was a major concern in one of the driving forces behind, the move to the new arena. >> Professor Pitman, you might want to comment, at this point, on the finance and construction and market surveys done to determine in advance of construction whether or not a particular facility fits the community profile necessary to support a pro sports team. >> Yes, indeed Gerry. Thanks. Certainly when one thinks about the construction of new arenas, big on the way to do financing is public-private partnerships. And that invariably involves county governments, state governments getting involved putting up some resources, to help build a new stadium, usually perhaps refurbish a stadium. The key element in all of this, however, is for the team involved to know its target audience. What's your target niche? So this means, what's the population base that you're going to draw from? How large is that? Over what geographic range? What cities are around? and things like that. What're the demographics? i.e. the age structure of that population base? Older fans. Younger fans. Because each of them looks for a different kind of experience when they go to games and watch games. What's the economic power of that fan base? So who will buy the high end suites? Who will buy the season tickets? What's the audience for the 10 pack of games? And who are the single game ticket buyers? So we need to know all of that information so that one can structure the arena to the right target audience so that you've got enough high end suites or the cheap seats or seats up in the nose bleed in order to fill the stadium, given the population that you're going to draw from. You also want to know something about the businesses in the area. The local and regional businesses. These will be the places that you'll, usually sell some of the suites and some of the season tickets. And that will also help you identify both sponsorship and advertising for the arena. So it's sort of old fashioned, but it's, know your target audience. And the more you know about that target audience, the better you will be able to plan for your new arena and actually go and sell it out. >> Good point. Let's jump to fan engagement. Sorry Professor Drew for the interruption. I thought that was just a great segue, as they say, to probably the most important aspect, or the most visible aspect, of arena finance and operation and management, which is fan engagement. Fan engagement meaning, what does your audience look for in the product that you're delivering from this facility and basically what fans want. It's been proven over several studies and examinations that while there may be multiple attributes of the facility that are attractive to various elements of your audience, what the fans really want is a good team, a clean, safe environment, an enjoyable experience, and decently priced concessions and other novelties that they might purchase while they're there. Basically a fun experience! [MUSIC]
