Chris Lyons walked into the TGL a few weeks before we recorded, and what stopped him wasn't the golf. It was the green.
One green. For eighteen holes. Fully motorized, rotating and resetting between every putt — each hole a different surface, a different shape, programmed to match wherever the simulator said the ball had landed. Tiger Woods and a room full of music and crowd noise and a giant screen eating up the wall. Chris said it was fascinating. I think the word he was looking for was diagnostic — because what TGL is actually doing isn't building a golf experience. It's solving the problem that every major sport is quietly panicking about, the one nobody wants to say out loud at a league meeting.
The problem is attention. And attention doesn't go to where the game is anymore. It goes to where the experience is.
The building that forgot it was a platform
I've played in a lot of stadiums. Jerry's World is probably still my favorite — there's something about that place that finds another gear in me that I can't fully explain. I've never had a bad game there. When I was back at AT&T Stadium on Thanksgiving calling a game for Sky Sports, I watched fans rush the standing-only section on the concourse and box each other out for space like it was a playoff series. No seats. Just standing room. And they were fighting for it. That's the atmosphere Jerry Jones built.
But then Chris mentioned Real Madrid's stadium, and I had to stop and actually think about it. What they did at the Bernabéu — the retractable pitch, the rotating turf, the entire infrastructure that lets them flip the stadium from a Champions League final to an NFL game to a concert and back again — that's not renovation. That's an operating system upgrade on a hundred-year-old asset. They didn't build a better stadium. They built a stadium that can be whatever the calendar demands.
The gap between those two things is the whole conversation.
The airport got there first
Chris made the best analogy I've heard in a long time, and I told him so on the show. He compared the evolution of fan engagement to what airports have been doing with security friction — the idea being that if you can get people through TSA faster, they have more time and more mental space to spend money on the other side. Longer runway to the gate, more dollars at the restaurant, more merch moved before boarding.
He'd just gone through Heathrow, forgot he had two or three water bottles in his bag from an all-nighter at Sky Sports, and nobody stopped him. First-mover advantage for the UK. And his point was: the moment you remove that friction — the moment passengers stop dreading the security line and start thinking about what they want when they get through — they become buyers again. They were buyers the whole time. The friction just kept converting them into victims.
The Intuit Dome in LA is doing this for sports. Facial recognition at entry. Cashless concession stands that charge through your face. Thirty-eight thousand square feet of Halo board. In-seat charging. Sound meters that measure which section is loudest and turn it into a competition. They named it one of Time's World's Greatest Places in 2025 — a stadium on that list — which tells you something about where the threshold has moved for what an arena is supposed to be.
Chris said about a third of fans are expected to opt into facial authentication systems. By the end of the first game, about seventy-five percent of those people are enrolled. That's not slow adoption. That's the rate you see when something removes real friction for real people in real time.
PULL QUOTE: "Technology should remove friction — but you should still be able to feel the soul of that team and the soul of the stadium." — Chris Lyons
The third space problem
Here's the version of this that I think most team owners are underestimating. Chris brought up Cosm — it's an 87-foot LED dome, somewhere between the Sphere and a planetarium, purpose-built for sports. They've got locations in LA and Dallas. Detroit's coming. Atlanta's coming for the 2026 World Cup. The NBA signed a long-term partnership through 2030.
The idea is simple: you get the courtside feeling without buying the courtside seat. For a fraction of the cost — Chris put it at three to four times less — you're in an immersive dome watching the game at a scale that genuinely makes you feel inside it, instead of watching a fifty-inch television at a sports bar while someone's elbow is in your drink.
I told him it sounded like Dave & Buster's on steroids, and he said exactly — kids in one area, adults in their suite-style setup, everyone fully immersed, nobody having paid the four or five thousand dollars a night those actual courtside seats cost in the real arena.
The reason this matters isn't that Cosm is a cool company. It's what Cosm represents: the disaggregation of the stadium experience. The game is still at the arena. But the experience of the game is now portable. It can be in a dome in suburban Atlanta. It can be in a location on the Vegas Strip. It can be wherever someone is willing to build a platform and cut a media rights deal.
This changes the math for the teams. The Braves figured it out first, at least in terms of the physical campus model — restaurants, retail, live entertainment, interactive experiences all built into and around the stadium's footprint. The game becomes the anchor, not the product. The product is the entire ecosystem that happens because the game brought people to the zip code.
I've thought about this kind of real estate and development play for a while. The teams that crack it first aren't just building stadiums — they're building neighborhoods that happen to have a stadium at the center. That's not an entertainment venue. That's an economic engine for a city, and the team that owns it owns the upside on all of it.
Hide the wires
There's a version of this conversation that goes wrong. I've seen it happen in technology investing, and I think it can happen in stadium tech too. You take a genuinely important insight — friction kills revenue, immersion creates loyalty — and you execute it in a way that makes the friction worse, not better.
Chris's line for it was hide the wires. The best venues are going to use tech to get fans back in their seats faster, so they can focus on the game and the atmosphere and the community. The technology should be invisible. The experience should be undeniable.
I think about this when I hear about dynamic ticketing — the idea that if you can only come for the first half, or if the couple in the courtside seats has to leave early, their seats should be upgradeable in real time for whoever's still in the building. That's a genuinely good idea. But if the app that handles it takes four screens and a loading time to navigate, you've added friction in the name of removing it. You've built a feature that punishes the people it's supposed to serve.
The same goes for AI-driven in-seat promotions. Chris mentioned the idea of getting a push notification for free chicken nuggets when a specific player misses a free throw — triggered by the moment, delivered instantly. That's seamless. That's the technology disappearing into the experience. What doesn't work is a seven-step loyalty rewards interface that makes you feel like you're filing a tax return to get a discount on nachos.
The teams that win this aren't the ones who install the most technology. They're the ones who make you forget the technology is there.
What I'd actually track, watching this space develop
Three things I'm paying attention to now, after this conversation:
- Which teams are building campuses, not stadiums. The Braves model — mixed-use development surrounding the venue, multiple revenue streams from the same footprint, the game as an anchor rather than a product — is the right template. The question for any new stadium deal is whether the team owns the economic upside on everything surrounding it, not just the building. The Commanders' new stadium project at the JFK site is one to watch. If they're thinking about it as a campus, the land alone is a multi-decade wealth creation event. If they're thinking about it as a building, they're leaving most of the money on the table.
- Who builds the real off-site experience layer. Cosm has the right idea, but the idea isn't defensible unless the media rights deals are locked and the venue count gets high enough to become habitual. The NBA partnership through 2030 is a good sign. The question is whether leagues start treating off-site immersive venues as part of their distribution strategy — the same way streaming became part of their media strategy — or whether they try to wall it off. If they wall it off, someone else builds the wall anyway and the leagues end up licensing to them. Better to own the relationship early.
- Whether the friction removal actually converts. The Intuit Dome facial recognition adoption number — 75% enrolled by end of game one — is the kind of data point that should be in every team owner's strategy deck right now. The question isn't whether fans will accept the technology. They will, faster than expected, if it works. The question is whether the teams are capturing the revenue that faster entry and frictionless concessions unlock, or whether they're eating the infrastructure cost without building the data layer that makes it compound over time. The airport got rich by knowing what you bought after you cleared security. The smart stadiums will get rich by knowing what you want before you get hungry.
The game hasn't changed. Twenty-two people on a field, forty minutes on a clock, the same basic drama it's always been. What's changed is everything around the game — where you watch it, how you feel while you're watching it, what the organization captures from the moment you pull into the parking lot to the moment you're back on the highway.
Chris said the best venues are going to use tech to get fans back into their seats faster. I'd add one word to that: wealthier. The best venues are going to use tech to make themselves wealthier by making the experience worth more. The fans who show up are the asset. The stadium is just the platform.
Build the platform right, and the asset appreciates every single year.