This article - co-authored by James and Tom Bulley - blends their own Gen X and Gen Z perspectives to assess the evolution of live event venues, asserting that modern stadia must become integrated, human-centric experiential platforms where technology enables rather than defines the experience.
Who are you actually designing for?
The thing about stadiums is they have forgotten their routes; remembering the Roman amphitheatres of 2000 years ago. Stadium designers over the last 30 years have focussed on improved crowd flow, seat comfort, hospitality and architecture. But today more than ever, events are judged on the experiences they create. Modern advancements in stadia and arena designs have focussed on technology. But when tech becomes the main focal point to achieve immersive experiences, that’s where it goes wrong.
The Yellow Wall at Borussia Dortmund holds just over 24,000 people in a single standing tier, the largest freestanding terrace in European football and one of the most powerful atmospheres in world sport. There's almost no consumer-facing technology in it. Choreography, song, banners, beer and 24,000 people doing the same thing every other Saturday. By any honest definition, that's ultimate immersion. Just as the England Football fans renditions of “It’s Coming Home”, “Sweet Caroline” and “Wonderwall” unites crowds in unison.
The LA Dodgers “Pups at the Park” - bring your dog to game day - requires no technology. Just a lot of pet merch sales and pages of social media pics of dogs at a baseball match. The dogs create the entertainment; unexpected and unpredictable delivering unique experiences. That’s immersion.
At the other end, the Sphere in Las Vegas opened in September 2023 at a build cost of $2.3 billion, and U2 played a 40-show residency to 661,456 ticket holders for an estimated $256 million. That's also immersion, of a sort, but not the benchmark for venues of the future.
The audience is often the creator of immersion. The coming together of people to share experiences is what matters most at live events. Technology can be an enabler of immersive experiences but not the driver. The venues that will win over audiences in the future will be the ones that know exactly who’s in the building, protect what makes the venue distinctive, and create the platform to enable immersion. Spending big on screens is easy but isn’t the tipping point for a wholly immersive experience.
But it’s never one thing or everyone together. In the same building you’ll find a Gen Z (aged 14-29) fan collecting a memory she’ll wear all year, a Gen X (aged 46-61) fan who wants the whole experience to work from car park to final whistle, a Boomer (aged 62-71) who came for the sport and a supporter in the corner who’s there to sing. Successful venues serve all of them.
What follows is an assessment of the key trends and considerations that are impacting decision making for venues of the future.
Tom’s Gen Z Viewpoint: Gen Z; we have grown up surrounded by technology – but it’s really not something we are too impressed by. Growing up in the digital age leads us to value immersion through human interaction; the unique moments that being at a live event promises instead of watching at home. Technology should support the authentic human moments in events rather than dominate them.
1. For Gen Z, being there becomes part of who they are
The numbers first. Eventbrite's 2025 survey of US and UK 18-to-35-year-olds found 73% planned to attend live events within six months, rising to 79% in its 2026 follow-up. Morning Consult has Gen Z adults attending regular professional sport at the highest rate of any cohort, around 18% going to two to four games a year. The intent is real and the spend is real. The argument that young people had given up on live entertainment isn't supported by the data.
The interesting question is what they’re buying. For most Gen Z attendees the value runs deeper than the two hours of the event. The concert or the final goes into the story they tell about themselves. I was there, and that says something about who I am. AEG’s 2025 live music study found 65% of Gen Z said being a fan was a strong part of their identity, seven in ten had felt "at home" among other fans and 73% had made a brand purchase decision based on a sponsor’s link to the event. That last figure is the answer to why any of this makes money.
Watch the fan in the front row. They are making content from the moment they sit down. They’ll film the goal, post it before the players reach the centre circle and tag the brand on their shirt. Give them something worth posting and they’ll does the marketing the venue would normally have paid for. Leave them with nothing and the queue becomes the content.
Gen Z isn’t monolithic either. Eventbrite reports 74% think in-person experiences matter more than digital ones and 46% are limiting their screen time. They want something they can’t get on the sofa, they want it unrepeatable and they’ll smell a gimmick at 50 paces. It needs to be authentic and belong to all segments of the audience. Design for a single segment of the audience, and you lose it.
Tom’s Gen Z Viewpoint: We have seen this during the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Team shirts act as mobile advertising for football, but also an extension of identity beyond a 90-minute fixture. I see people wearing their England shirt on holiday, at train stations, or in the pub and immediately there is a connection. We are strangers but we share an identity that starts on the pitch but extends into our daily lives.
2. Where immersion starts
Immersion is the orchestration of meaning, belonging and authenticity in a physical place, and technology is one tool among several. The Yellow Wall is immersion. So is a pre-match light show, so is a wrap-around LED screen. They sit on the same spectrum, but venues that mistake the spectacle for the destination, can overspend and underdeliver.
Authenticity is the thread. The Yellow Wall works because it belongs to the fans who built it. The stand is season-ticket-only and the waiting list runs to years. Attempts to copy it mostly fail. You can replicate the chants and the banners, but the belonging underneath took decades to grow.
Authentic immersion doesn’t have to be high-tech. The LA Dodgers’ "Pups at the Park" has run for over a decade. The June 2024 edition drew 48,251, with thousands of dogs in costume on parade. It’s silly, it’s unmistakeably the Dodgers, and it earns a day’s social-media coverage no in-stadium screen could buy.
At the spectacle end, the Sphere works for the content it was built for. A second full-scale Sphere, costing $1.7 billion and 20,000 capacity, was confirmed for Yas Island in Abu Dhabi in May 2026 for completion by the end of 2029. The model is expanding, but it isn’t the destination every venue should travel towards.
Picture a basketball match, a football or a chamber concert in there. The screen would overpower all three, when the whole point of each is what's happening in front of you. One concertgoer at U2’s residency told The Irish Times that in the chase for perfect visuals and sound, the music-goers had become an afterthought. That’s not a marginal view.
Before any of that, venues need a technology baseline that works, and it’s far more than mobile reception. It’s the connective tissue that runs the guest’s whole day; curated fan journeys. Mobile ticketing and frictionless entry. Dynamic wayfinding and crowd management tools that cuts queues. Cashless payment, self-serve food and beverage and mobile ordering to speed service delivery. And the data underneath that ties it all together and turns it into information to improve revenue and experience.
Every one of those systems lives or dies on connectivity that holds up at scale, which is harder than it sounds. Take Milano Cortina 2026, the most geographically dispersed Olympics in history. Holding reliable connectivity across that spread, venue by venue, was a real test.
At San Siro, TIM’s dedicated 5G network lifted download speed by 500%, and the closing ceremony was shared over full 5G inside the Verona Arena, a 2,000-year-old Roman amphitheatre. Get that bit wrong and none of it works. The app stalls, the queue runs ten deep and immersion is a fan staring at a phone that won’t connect while 60,000 others cheer something that fan just missed.
Designing in the base technology infrastructure however isn’t the start point. The baseline comes from the vision for a venue, where everyone attending has an incredible experience and everyone is included, which starts from the creative design and fan experience planning process. Getting that bit right and clearly defined before starting the architectural and engineering design, is critical to future proofing stadiums and arenas.
Get that baseline set from day one and the commercial case follows. Integrated, it raises naming-rights value, deepens sponsor inventory and extends dwell time - the most reliable predictor of secondary spend. Bolt the same systems on later, one contract at a time, and you pay more for less. Retrofit is the most expensive way to buy any of it.
3. Hospitality has become the product
For most modern venues the premium hospitality guest has overtaken the season-ticket holder as the business model. Hospitality has graduated from selling a nicer pie to designing a social environment that holds the guest for three hours before kick-off and two after, with the football in the middle.
Tottenham Hotspur Stadium is a prime British case study. The H Club offers Michelin Star calibre dining, extended pre and post-match access, dining with club legends and a personal account manager. The Tunnel Club sits behind the home dugout with a direct view of the players’ tunnel, and members have at times been offered the chance to walk out onto the pitch themselves. These were designed as products from the first sketch.
Fulham’s Riverside Stand at Craven Cottage reaches the same place by a different route - layering hospitality into a deliberately preserved heritage venue, a Thames-side terrace, a riverside walk, intimate dining. Nothing feels imposed.
The reason hospitality has become the product is commercial. Premium guests pay a multiple of general-admission revenue, spend more per head, are easier to move into year-round membership and are the most open to a personalised offer. The venue can recognise a premium guest, remember her usual interval drink and offer an upgrade before she asks. But that only works when the venue’s ticketing, ordering, loyalty and hospitality systems are joined up and share the same customer information. Get that right and the personalised offer runs at scale for almost no extra cost per guest.
A venue that bought the same systems on separate contracts can’t do it, however much it spent. The gap opened at the design stage, long before any technology arrived.
4. Personalisation is powerful, but it can break the crowd
Personalisation is the dominant venue-technology trend right now. Apps that learn preferences, dynamic pricing, individual content layers, targeted offers, biometric entry. It works commercially. It also carries the seed of the thing that breaks the live experience.
The clearest example is the Intuit Dome, the LA Clippers’ $2 billion arena that opened in August 2024. A fan uploads a selfie and links a payment card before the game, then a camera at the arena matches their face to that selfie, so they walk straight in and pay for food, drink and merchandise just by looking at a camera. No ticket, no phone, no queue. It is a frictionless one-to-one check against a photo the fan chose to hand over, not a crowd scan.
The franchise expected a third of fans to enrol and got close to three quarters. The venue gains a fuller picture of who is in the building and the fan accepts a little less privacy for it. Handle it carelessly and the building fills with people staring at their phones while the moment passes them by.
The point of being there, with 60,000 other people, is the shared emotion. If every fan is in their own algorithmic bubble when the goal goes in, the crowd stops being a crowd. Personalise everything around the moment and leave the moment alone. The journey, the ticket, the wayfinding, the concession order and the upgrade all reward personalisation through upsell, retention and data. The goal looks the same to everyone in the building, and breaking it into individual feeds destroys the very thing people paid to be part of.
Tom’s Gen Z Viewpoint: Personalisation for Gen Z is normal. Tik Tok creates an algorithm around what I watch, Amazon recommends products I might like, and Spotify creates custom playlists to my music taste. Personalisation is our expectation. Live events should not be personalised. Everyone in the crowd experiences the same moment of heartbreak or roar of celebration together. The best personalisation should take away the irritating aspects of attending events (queuing, trekking to the concession stand, navigating the venue) but not optimise away the unexpected moments that make live events special.
5. Content is now a primary product. Is your venue built for it?
For a growing share of any audience, the live event is consumed first as content and second as an event. Even inside the stadium, many people film, post and watch the replay on the big screen before they look back at the field. That’s the reality, whether we like it or not.
Broadcast-grade infrastructure now belongs in the base build. SoFi Stadium’s Infinity Screen, a 70,000 square-foot dual-sided centre-hung board, is the most extreme example. The screen is longer than the pitch beneath it, and it’s a programmable media platform running sponsorship, replay, app, broadcast and social content from one source. The honest critique is the same one made of the Sphere. A screen that big can pull attention from the field. The question is whether the venue programmes it to enhance the moment on the pitch or compete with it.
Esports Stadium Arlington was built broadcast-first from day one, with clear sightlines, content-creator boxes, integrated production pipelines and second-screen layers. It's essentially a broadcast studio that happens to seat an audience. At the other extreme, Travis Scott's "Astronomical" inside Fortnite in April 2020 drew 12.3 million concurrent players to its opening show and over 27 million unique attendees across five performances, dispensing with the building entirely. Both are now part of the competitive set.
A venue built for content opens revenue streams a gate-only venue cannot. Pre-event storytelling, in-venue activations, second-screen experiences and post-event digital extensions all become products the venue can package, sell and run year-round.
Tom’s Gen Z Viewpoint: At a soccer match, for example, my generations intention is quite paradoxical. We want to catch the goal on our phone to post on social media or to relive later. Yet, the reason we travelled to the event was to watch it live and feel the reaction of the 50,000 fans around me. The best venues understand this contradiction: technology needs to preserve and extend the memory of the moment but not replace it. Missing a goal and thinking ‘It’s okay I can rewatch it on the big screen’ takes away the magic of being there.
6. The hidden risk: most immersive investment is poorly integrated
This is the argument nobody else makes, and it's the one that matters most.
Most venues that have invested in immersion have done it piecemeal. A screen on one contract. An app on another. A wristband from a third vendor. A perimeter LED deal from a fourth. None share data, none give a unified view of the fan, none roll up into a single proposition a sponsor can buy. So, the app gets poor adoption, the LED sells at a discount, the spend data never connects to the season-ticket file.
After three years the board concludes immersion doesn’t work and waters the ambition down. That conclusion misreads the evidence. The concept was sound. What failed was the way it was bought and delivered, in pieces, by vendors who never had to share data.
The counterexamples are real. SoFi was master planned around its content and digital infrastructure, and the Infinity Screen earns its keep because every other system was designed to feed it. Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta integrated ticketing, concessions and the app from the start, and its fan-friendly concession pricing only works because the data feeds are unified end to end.
The Intuit Dome reaches a single fan record because Face ID was a foundational decision, not a bolt-on. Vendor analyses of digital perimeter signage suggest sponsor visibility uplifts of around 40% over static signage where integration is genuinely end to end, and far less where it isn’t. The numbers vary from study to study, but the direction is consistent.
After three decades delivering major events, the lesson is that integration is a delivery problem. It must get developed in the strategy and concept of operations, masterplan, the procurement strategy and the contracts between technology providers, sponsors, venue operator and event owner, long before any software is installed.
The chant in the corner is still worth more than the LED above it
In 20 years’ time the venues that matter will be the ones that understood two things. First, the building is now a programmable experience platform, capable of hosting different audiences, commercial models and narrative layers at once. Second, the human element is non-negotiable. The chant, the goosebump, the strangers around you, the dog in the ballpark, the goal everyone sees live in front of them at exactly the same moment. Technology either serves those moments or it gets in their way.
The economics follow the design. A venue that integrates from day one, designs for the whole room and amplifies what's already true about its sport and city, captures more revenue and fills more seats than one that buys the parts in pieces and builds for a single segment.
We may be wrong on specifics. A new venue category may grow faster than we expect or hit a ceiling sooner. The next personalisation tool may prove more invasive than fans tolerate, or less.
What we’re not wrong about is the principle. Immersion is the orchestration of meaning, belonging and shared emotion in a physical place. The venues that win will design for their own crowd, in their own city, with their own history. Integration is a delivery problem and authenticity is the differentiator. The chant in the corner is still worth more than the LED above it, and probably always will be.