Breathe
By Barbara Anderson
Arlington, Texas: It's like being inside an architect's model. That's how it feels to walk through the thousands of square meters of the Dallas Cowboys' AT&T Stadium, like being inside an architect's model: neat, tidy, modern, quiet, clean, in neat shades of gray-blue-white, imposing and perfect.
The trite phrase "everything is bigger in Texas" was respected to the letter in this dome that shines in Arlington.
However, the guide who takes us behind the scenes of the NFL's largest stadium, pauses in his merolico speech: "but as you can see it is old in some parts, its carpets for example, and it needs an immediate remodeling to be ready for the event that causes us so much excitement as being part of the 2026 World Cup". It sounded like a joke (what could this highly technological building, designed to be unique down to the smallest detail, be missing?), but the truth is that during 2024 it will receive an injection of $295 million dollars and will be closed to polish over what has been polished and leave it almost without competition to host the final of the tripartite World Cup shared by Mexico, the United States and Canada. According to the directors, the stadium will radically improve the 'look' of the 100,000 seats it displays in mega events, with a focus on luxury for its VIP areas, although most of that money will be invisible to spectators as it will be used in its entire technological framework.
"This morning I had my first work call with the FIFA team. Very curious because they wanted me to give them the detailed information on how all the technological intelligence of the stadium works, from ticket sales to our innovation in IT security. No: I just told them to give me their list of requirements and that I was going to exceed them; our technology is not shared," the stadium's CIO, Matt Messick, told a group of Mexican journalists at a press conference. Although he did not go into detail about where the investment will be, Messick emphasized the need to expand its private mobile networks, that invisible spectrum that consumes so much due to the intensive use of cellular telephony by thousands and thousands of people.
Everything vibrates for technology at this company/football team. Their practice field in Frisco, (The Star) is their test lab for technologies destined for AT&T Stadium. For example, he said that, during the early years of The Star's operation, the Cowboys had created a video replay system to assist coaches and players during practice that was ahead of today's systems.
The Dallas Colossus
When it opened in 2009, today's AT&T Stadium became the largest NFL headquarters, the most prominent domed building in the United States and when the roof was closed, it became the largest air-conditioned venue in the world.
But undoubtedly its crown and seals was the centerpiece, its impressive 60-ton screen and the two 48-by-27-foot televisions in front of each end zone, a high-definition video space nearly 60 yards long.
And one of the reasons why it is one of the most recognized stadiums is because of its technology: it was the first 100% 5G stadium in the world, operated by AT&T, the Texas-based telecommunications consortium that has the cobranding of the most valuable sports team on the planet (9,500 million dollars).
The stadium's physical and digital cellular network is the largest operated by AT&T in the country and was upgraded during the pandemic to take advantage of the shutdown. It has 56 thousand kilometers of optical fiber, plus a thousand 4G LTE antennas, which allows it to create a system that supports a transmission of 100 Gbit per second. As an example, the stadium's CIO explained that in the Cowboys' last game against the Texans last December, the stadium's network used 9.19 terabytes of data and connected more than 100,000 voice calls.
5G and sport
"We want to turn our fans into fanatics," Cowboys owner, oil billionaire Jerry Jones said in an interview when it opened two decades ago. Today with the wi-fi transmission speed it hosts, technical power and social media penetration, the stadium is a powerhouse of compulsive content creators. "It's incredible, but we have to explain to the organizers of the World Cup that there will be not several, but 100,000 shots and videos in real time of each play, of each match, that is, the one that each attendee records and transmits live from their cell phone," adds Jason Inskeep, Director of the 5G Center of Excellence AT&T.
And this is currently possible and promises to improve even in the run-up to the 2026 tripartite World Cup thanks to 5G technology.
How could we change the way people interact with our game without being part of that shared in-game experience? How could it be something they couldn't replicate anywhere else, club officials told us leaning against the glass case that separates them with the tons of servers that support their connectivity. AT&T controls the stadium's data center, which is the "brain" of the building.
What is the use of having the largest 5G coverage in a sports or event space like this? In security, it allows monitoring each attendee and groups of people to avoid concentrations and meet their requirements (from access to their seats to refreshments brought to their seats) to recording the temperature of employees and biometric data in real time. The stadium control center can react to any eventuality throughout the stadium.
In experience, it allows attendees to take and send high-definition videos and photos in real time. In addition, the team's players have a chip in their uniform that allows attendees to know the speed of movement of each player, their performance in the game, play statistics and even take pictures with them. They also have a game through 5G Game View that allows them to play in augmented reality with people inside and outside the stadium and even create their own clips. This level of customization allows users to provide more information to the team to update data and statistics per game and player (the app is called StARview).
You can also cheer from home: the AT&T Fan Zone app allows fans at home to record their messages and reactions and project them on the LiveFX board during the games. As for in-stadium services, "to reduce crowds at the food counters, we created a map that allowed each person to see how many people were at each booth, and then we went a step further and brought each spectator what they wanted to their seat with just one click," adds CIO Matt Messick.
Already at the Qatar World Cup, the technology in each stadium enabled a quantum leap in interactivity without loss of signal or call quality. At peak times of the matches in each venue, 5G speeds reached peaks of 2Gb per second, the equivalent of 630,000 voice calls per second. And it was also the debut of the FIFA+ app, which allows access to real-time statistics, heat maps and even VAR replays in real time (i.e., with the referee himself).
Surely the 2026 World Cup will be more experiential than ever before and undoubtedly the advances that the NFL has been imposing on the most popular sport in the United States will expand to FIFA, an organization that is lagging behind in this game where everything no longer happens at the field level but at the cell phone screen level.
For now it will put 5G technology as a new 'minimum' for stadiums on this side of the border.
The opinions expressed are the responsibility of the authors and are absolutely independent of the position and editorial line of Opinion 51.
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