One of the facts of life of being an NFL fan today is that it’s increasingly becoming more fun to watch at home than to go to a game. As more fans play fantasy football and watch on HD televisions with NFL Sunday Ticket or Red Zone Channel, they’d rather stay home and monitor all the games than go to the stadium and see only the game on the field in front of them.
So how can the Los Angeles Rams ensure that their multibillion-dollar stadium complex attracts fans? By catering to the very fans who like to watch more than one game at once.
Rams COO Kevin Demoff told the Los Angeles Times that the new stadium in Inglewood will have features that make it a fun way to spend a Sunday beyond just watching the Rams game.
“This is the stadium of the future for the NFL and hopefully for other sporting venues,” Demoff said. “When you look — especially in L.A. — it’s a melting pot of NFL fans. You look at the Steelers bars and Redskins bars and Bears bars. You want to take that and put it into your campus and find ways that at every turn people can watch the other games. L.A.’s become a fantasy-oriented, Red Zone-oriented, DirecTV-oriented culture. And I think our job is to blend that with now having a hometown team. To start to build that allegiance where you walk into the stadium and you never feel that you’re giving up everything else that’s going on Sunday but you still have the Rams right in front of you.”
There’s little doubt that fans want to be able to keep tabs on their fantasy teams and other games around the league while they’re at a game, and so the stadium of the future needs to give fans that opportunity. At the same time, the Rams have to give the fans something better than they can get at home. Winning football would go a long way toward attracting fans to that shiny new stadium.