Next year Major League Soccer will officially debut its 23rd team, the Los Angeles Football Club. And though the expansion team has yet to play a single game, it's already been making waves. The team will be opening a state-of-the-art stadium in downtown LA, and it's already brought on some major corporate sponsors like IBM and Heineken. Now LAFC has signed SeatGeek as its official ticketing partner.
SeatGeek will provide the marketplace for both primary and secondary LAFC ticket sales, as well as tickets for non-MLS events in Banc of California Stadium. The company will also be a team sponsor with in-stadium activations, which currently include plans to put SeatGeek branding on the stadium's box office.
For LAFC, the deal isn't as much about getting fans into the stadium - the team expects to sell out in its debut season - as it is about knowing who those fans are, since SeatGeek's mobile platform allows the team to capture fan identities. "That's the game now, for the team owners and venue operators, is trying to understand who's in the building," says LAFC chief business officer Larry Freedman. "And once you can understand who's in the building, you have a better opportunity to improve your level of engagement with that fan."
And that approach ultimately links back to LAFC's intention to provide its fans an optimal in-stadium technology experience. Freedman notes that SeatGeek is a tech company at heart, something that resonated with team leadership. Unlike more restrictive endemic ticket companies, SeatGeek operates an
open distribution model
, which that allows online retailers to freely use the company's APIs. SeatGeek's distribution partners include ticket marketplaces like Gametime and TicketNetwork, and in October SeatGeek also partnered with Facebook.
SeatGeek first stepped into the MLS space as a sponsor last year, when the company partnered with MLS on a league-level deal. SeatGeek co-founder Russ D'Souza says that partnership essentially gave the company a foot in the door, since it's still up to SeatGeek to sign the individual clubs. "We have to convince them that open distribution is going to make them more money," says D'Souza, who argues that the league-level deal is essentially an "internal marketing platform" for reaching those teams.
The company signed Sporting Kansas City out of the gate, and it's since added the Seattle Sounders, Portland Timbers, Minnesota United and now LAFC (SeatGeek has also partnered with the New Orleans Saints and New Orleans Pelicans). That roster includes some of the league's most popular teams, an intentional strategy since those deals are ultimately intended to be the success stories used to sell the remaining MLS teams on the SeatGeek model. LAFC, which is already making a major splash months before its first game, is primed to be among the best.
"I think what we're excited about is that, so far, we've been able to win over teams on the vision," says D'Souza, "And what we expect is that, once we're able to have these shining examples of the different kind of ticketing experience, that other MLS teams are going to be eager to do the same thing too."
