Breaking the football dynamic, that is broken

Maybe it's because he's roaming freer than ever now he's no longer listed on the Front Office page of the San Francisco 49ers website, but Leeds chair and Rangers vice-chair Paraag Marathe made a rookie error at Leaders Week London.

The trick to speaking at these sports industry summits is to impress the room without attracting attention from outside the room. Andrea Radrizzani used to trip over this while he owned Leeds, mixing up his chatter about acquiring related businesses, like YouTubers 'Team Whistle', with proposing a 'Premier League 2'. Todd Boehly turned it into an art, while at Chelsea, asking — out loud, in front of people — "why don’t we do a tournament with the bottom four sports teams, why isn’t there a [north vs south] All-Star game?"

The sports industry cohort's current obsession with Artificial Intelligence put some new, treadable rakes in front of Marathe at last week's summit. The aim was to say something interesting enough that everyone present would ask an AI tool to post it on their LinkedIn profiles for them. Unfortunately Marathe decided to say something that crossed over with the attention Venns of us, Leeds supporting, plebs.

"Off the pitch, something that I’ve been thinking about is pricing tickets in the stadium doing dynamic pricing, similar to how the airline industry does it," Marathe said. "Not just to maximise price, but if there’s a way to truly dynamically price based on your supporters — how frequently they go and how much they transact and interact with the club — we can make it more affordable for those folks or certain seats where it’s a little bit more of a hospitality corporate area."

Nobody ever says they want to use AI to make us happier, do they? It's never, 'Use AI + [something] = soft play centre but for adults'. It's always 'Use AI + [something] = make money, become like god'. Marathe did seem vaguely aware of this, at least within the financial terms he works with, claiming that, "There’s probably an opportunity to do it in a way that does increase revenue, but also makes it affordable for your most hardcore fans". 

But it didn't take long for the rookie rake to hit him face first: City AM's report on his comments included the subheading, 'Leeds United to hike prices?'

Leeds United have since denied that. A club spokesperson told The Athletic, "Leeds United have no plans to introduce AI-driven dynamic ticket pricing at this time." Even Marathe didn't sound particularly convinced. "We can make it more affordable for those folks or certain seats where it’s a little bit more of a hospitality corporate area" is the sound of someone saying a quarter-formed idea out loud because they're onstage at an industry conference and everyone there is talking about AI and revenue and sounds dead clever.

Marathe, until the summer, was the Niners' main guy for negotiating player contracts around the NFL salary cap. Ticketing, on the 49ers org chart, was a whole other team of eight, far from Marathe among the staff of 250. I'm sure Marathe is learning ticketing and the other ropes of soccer club ownership as fast as he can, but I don't think I'm being unfair suggesting this is new territory for him.

But his idea is not completely uninformed by the corporate milieu he inhabits. What he was proposing sounds like some sort of gamified loyalty scheme for cheaper tickets, which is right in the tech-world's Bay Area wheelhouse. For the loyalty of football fans, read the addiction of social media users, and football must be incredibly attractive to tech companies as its 'users' come with their loyalty/addiction already built in. If you think it's tough getting people to leave Twitter, try getting them to break up with their football team.