My Top 4 business-of-sports Professorial thoughts on attending a football match at Maracanã!

Ahh, Brasil and it’s love of football! As some of you may know, I spent 4 years working at the National Basketball Association (the NBA) and serve as an Adjunct Professor in Columbia University’s Masters in Sports Management Program. I clearly have a love of sports (especially my beloved Boston teams) and truly enjoy thinking about the various aspects of the business of sports. 

Given all that, is it really a surprise that while we were in Rio we decided to go to a soccer (fine, football) match at Maracanã Stadium? The most surprising part is that the sports-non-enthusiast on this trip, aka Damian, was even more interested to attend than I was!

Anyway, as we were going through the process of researching who was playing, figuring out how to get tickets, watching the game, etc. the analytical side of me was on overdrive! To give a little more background, during part of my time at the NBA I was in a group called TMBO (Team Business & Marketing Operations), where one of our roles was to find best practices from sports organizations around the world and learn how to apply them to the NBA teams’ businesses. Now it’s hard for me to go into any sporting event without thinking – ooh this is different, ooh this is awesome and the NBA should do this or even ooh this is not so good there is room for improvement.

So, with all that preamble, I thought I’d lay out my point of view as to what I observed and thought of during the football match we attended at Maracanã. Now, I’d like to note that I am not a football expert (or even aficionado) and that these observations are the result of attending a single game at Maracanã. Additionally, I’ve tried to make these observations sport-agnostic, since I do not have even close to enough knowledge on or experience with soccer in the US. This list is definitely not comprehensive or statistically significant, but I’d say it is interesting!

#1: Ticket buying process (aka will we actually get to see a football game?)

Holy moly, was this a thing. So, there’s a reason I haven’t yet clarified what game we went to. The first game we tried to attend was on Saturday night, it was Flamengo vs. América Futebol Clube (aka América Mineiro or América-MG), two teams in Campeonato Brasileiro Série A, Brazil’s top football league. Flamengo is the most popular team in the league with about 40 million fans and plays its home games at Maracanã Stadium, which has a capacity of about 70-80 thousand. We were pretty stoked about this game and we worked our butts off to get tickets. First, we went online but to buy them there you need to have a Brasilian CPF number (similar to a US Social Security Number). Then, the day of we went to Flamengo’s club in the city to buy tickets in person, but we got there at 4:15pm and they had stopped selling tickets at 3:00pm for the 7:00pm game. We then went to Maracanã stadium to buy directly there. When we got there we encountered a huge line.

We popped into the line, which was estimated to run about 40 minutes. While in line we started talking to folks around us and realized that about 95% of the folks in line were there to have their tickets validated. This means they had purchased their tickets online and then had to physically take the tickets to the box office, with a valid ID and sign them in front of a ticket agent; only then would the ticket be valid for entry. Given how prevalent scalping is in the US I thought this was a great way to ensure tickets remain in the hands of true fans. However, the system could use an update – if I was waiting 40 minutes in a crazy long line just to get my ticket validated on a Saturday night game, I would not be happy.

As for us, we rolled up to the ticket window a few minutes after 7:00pm, with the game already underway. We asked about what seats were available and decided to buy two for 160 reais, or about $45 total. The problem? It was cash only. At a ticket box office! And, there were no ATMs in any close location. Um, excuse me, what? We walked a little bit, but given it was dark, we were in an unknown area of Rio, the nearest ATM was maybe a 20-minute walk away according to the cops and the game was already 20-plus minutes in, we said forget it. (And yes, we tried to walk around Rio with as minimal cash as possible so we didn’t have 160 reais on us).

I was completely dumbfounded. This was one place where, if I were on the business-side of the football club or Maracanã, I would make a rapid change and accept credit cards. If the team is worried about low credit card penetration then I would accept debit cards. And if that is still too far they could make a nice chunk of change by installing ATMs around the stadium (where there is already a heavy police presence) and charging a hefty fee to those who use them.

So, after that debacle, we decided to go clubbing instead (see my previous post) and head to the Flumenense (vs. Cruzeiro) game at Maracanã the next day (Sunday).

#2: Ticket pricing

The second thing I thought was interesting was how ticket pricing worked. The tickets we were going to buy (the only ones left) for the Flamengo game on Saturday were 80 reais each for an upper level seat. We had wanted to buy lower level seats and had seen those online for about 150-300 reais each, depending on where they were. To be honest, I had no idea if this was an expensive or cheap game, if the pricing was good or not, etc. etc.

Luckily, we had another game to compare it to. When we went back up to Maracanã stadium on Sunday for the Flumenense game (this time much earlier and with more cash on us) the pricing scheme was totally different. I expected prices to be lower because Flumenense has a much smaller fanbase (only about 3-4 million vs. the 40 million for Flamengo) and the game was on a Sunday afternoon instead of a Saturday night. (Also, side note, the window openings at the ticket office are comically low).

But, I was completely surprised when the ticket office told us (well, Damian, remember, Jyoti doesn’t speak Portuguese) that every single ticket was 50 reais. They had only opened half of the lower part of the arena, but still, every ticket, whether right on the field or 30 rows up, whether behind the goal or at the midfield line was 50 reais.

In my class I talk about how most sports entities in the US are moving towards super differentiated ticket pricing to be able to capture the most value out of their arenas. Many teams will price the first five rows of a section differently from the second five rows of the section and so on. There are even places where an aisle seat is priced higher than the seat right next to it.

So I started thinking, hmm, why are this football club and stadium throwing away this potential revenue? And what it came down to is that the organizational complexity just wasn’t worth it. For a low revenue ($250k of tickets sold) and low attendance (~10,000 people) game, where most in the stadium were hardcore true fans just there to see their team play, it didn’t make sense to make things more complicated to get perhaps another $5-10k of revenue max. And, this was underscored when we walked in to get our seats and the usher said, “it’s free seating, sit anywhere you want in these sections” – which made for a great experience as a fan. It was a good lesson for me to learn – it’s easy to think about squeezing out another theoretical dollar of revenue, but it may not always be worth it.

#3: Football stadium setup

Once we entered Maracanã I was definitely in awe. Here was this hallowed ground where Pelé had played (reportedly in front of over 200,000 fans!), where the most recent FIFA World Cup and Summer Olympics were held, where dozens of Brasilian soccer greats had taken the stage and so on and so forth. The new roof looked beautiful and the setting evening sun made the sky all sorts of beautiful colors.

However, after I took my seat and started observing around me, there were two things that stood out to me. The first was that there was so much room in between the seats! When we were sitting in our (sit-wherever-you-want) seats, there was so much room for our knees and people could get past us easily without us even getting up. On top of that, the seats were at a completely random distance from one another across the rows. For example, two seats could be touching and then the next two seats could have six inches of space between them. I couldn’t get a great picture without being super creepy, but here’s an example below.

This felt very strange, as most stadiums are trying to pack in as many seats as possible. This is because many sports entities follow a “peak-on-peak” strategy. They recognize that they make most of their revenue (and profit) from a very small number of their most attractive games. Therefore it’s critical to pack in as many people as possible to these games and at the highest ticket prices possible. I’d like to note that I’ve become a little bit of a socialist here, as I think sports are a community good and the goal shouldn’t be to squeeze every dollar of revenue out as possible, but considering that only 1-2 of 20 football clubs in the Campeonato Brasileiro Série A league is profitable, I think making money is a fair focus here, especially for league sustainability.

Given the current financial situation of the clubs, and admittedly not knowing enough about how overcrowding led to tragedy at the stadium a few decades ago, I think there is major room for more revenue by standardizing the seat distance and trying to increase the stadium capacity even by 5-10%.

A second thing I noticed about Maracanã was the nascence of the signage. Around the stadium there were four large screens showing a close-up of the game (shown in the image below), but that was essentially it. There were no digital stats, no digital sponsorship signage, no “bells and whistles” – just the screen broadcasting the game, almost as if you were at home.

However, I didn’t feel as strongly about fancy displays as I did the seats. I think there is probably some value to be had by adding signage that can be sold to sponsors, but I don’t know if big fancy scoreboards are going to draw more fans to games. The culture of love for your team is so strong already and the atmosphere is so passionate and energetic that perhaps investing in a better scoreboard won’t have a positive ROI. But, it’s something that I would for sure at least look into if I was on that leadership team.

#4: Treatment of fans from the rival football team

So, this was interesting (and probably something that folks who have attended more non-US sporting events are most used to than I am). This observation started by me smiling and looking around and really enjoying the passion and dedication of the Flumenense fans. Even though it was a relatively unimportant game, early in the season, I’d say over 90% of the attendees were wearing Flumenense gear, and all were doing team cheers and many were cursing out the refs at every chance they got (actually, come to think of it, it reminded me a little of attending a University of Michigan football game, hmmm).

Anyway, because of that passion I appreciated how proactive Maracanã was in ensuring safety and fun for both the Flumenense and Cruzeiro fans. First, there was a separate seating section for the Cruzeiro fans. Granted it was the only part of the upper level that was open (muahaha, home field advantage), but it is a great idea. It is so much more fun to watch a game surrounded by people who are fans of the same team you love, and it also greatly reduces the number of fights between football fans who are, let’s say, extra passionate about their opposing teams.

But, Maracanã took it a step further here. A few minutes into the second half they started making announcements – that the Cruzeiro fans could only leave before the 40-minute mark of the second half or after all the Flumenense fans had left the stadium, and not any time in between. They repeated this announcement a few times and I thought, what a genius idea! The time right after a game – after one set of fans is happy and one set of fans is angry and both sets of fans are drunk – is rife for fights and the stadium was proactive in managing that. Anyone who has ever managed the “load in” and “load out” of a major event knows how stressful those times are, and I loved that Maracanã made this decision to ease that burden. I also like that it gives the fans of the hometown team a nod; knowing the deep personal connections Brasilian football fans have with their teams this “favoritism” felt completely in the right to me (and a decision that the visiting team’s fans would understand).

All in all, the most important thing is that we had so much fun at Maracanã and I’m glad we got to go and experience a true Brasilian football game! And, as dorky as it is, it’s fun to be able to look at the experience from the sports-business perspective as well 🙂

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Read more about our time in Brazil using the links below:

• Brazil Country Recap – What we loved (and didn’t love) in our six weeks there
• Iguazu Falls
• Exploring São Paulo
• Exploring Bonito
• Touring in Bonito (river snorkeling and waterfall hiking)
• Rio de Janeiro: Our first three days in Rio
• Rio de Janeiro: “Professor-ial” thoughts on attending a game at Maracana (you are here!)
• Rio de Janeiro: Volunteering with Project Favela
• Three days in the beach paradies of Ubatuba!
• Rio de Janeiro: Christ the Redeemer and Sugarloaf Mountain
• The amazing landscape of Lençóis Maranhenses
• Three days in the hippie beach town of Jericoacoara
• Why we had to skip Canoa Quebrada and go to Natal instead
• Six days in Praia da Pipa (my favorite beach town)
• 24 hours in Olinda