Behind that shift sits a new stack. The badge has become an identity system. AI has moved from the control room to the fan's phone. And the activations people line up for all hand them something personal to keep. This paper maps how that happened between 2024 and 2026, what the US mega-event run through LA28 will demand next, and why brand sponsors, not leagues, are the buyers to watch.

The playbook is clear. Connect the credential, the gate, the activation and the keepsake into one journey, and give every fan something worth taking home. Sport is proving it at the scale of millions. Enterprise events are next.

Live attendance is growing again, and the people driving the growth are the ones who expect the most from venue technology. In the US, sports event attendance rose 3% in 2024 over 2023, with half of that gain coming from women's sports (Two Circles, cited by Capgemini). Globally, the share of fans who often attend in person climbed from 34% in 2023 to 37% in 2025, led by Gen Z and millennials.

Fans are paying more for the privilege. Admission prices for sporting events jumped 22% year over year in May 2024, which raises the bar for every touchpoint between the parking lot and the seat. Venue owners are responding with capital: the global smart stadium market is projected to grow from $19.6 billion in 2024 to $41.7 billion by 2029.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup reset the scale of what a US-hosted event looks like. Roughly seven million spectators attended matches, and more than nine million more visited official Fan Festival sites (Inside World Football). The crowd outside the stadium was larger than the crowd inside it.

The printed credential is not disappearing at sporting events. It is being rebuilt as the visible layer of an identity and access system, with biometrics and mobile credentials running alongside it. The scale is the story: Paris 2024 issued and managed more than 400,000 Olympic accreditations and 240,000 Paralympic accreditations, and recorded 3.7 million access-control scans across the two Games (The Sports Examiner, reporting Atos results).

At the Olympics, the credential doubles as an identity document. The Paris 2024 Olympic Identity and Accreditation Card was a printed plastic card on a branded lanyard with a photo and a security hologram (Olympic Museum). Press cards were pre-validated and mailed from May 2024, so the printing and fulfillment window opened months before the first event (IOC).

The 2026 FIFA World Cup ran the same playbook across three countries. Media accreditation opened January 26, 2026 and closed March 31, 2026, with written press and photographer quotas distributed through a Quota Management System (Graphic Online). The Fan Festivals alone accredited more than 22,332 media representatives, reporters and influencers (FIFA).

FIFA's hiring shows how operational this work has become. Regional accreditation managers were responsible for fully equipped Accreditation Centers and for managing consumable stock, the card and ribbon supplies that keep printers running (TeamWork Online). Boston's host committee contracted a separate accreditation vendor for its Fan Festival and required it to integrate with the event management company so credentials matched the site's access design and security policy (GoFractional).

The NFL made facial authentication standard for credentialed staff, media and vendors across all 32 teams in the 2024 season, after a six-stadium pilot in 2023 (The Record). By December 2024, provider Wicket reported more than 250,000 enrolled credential holders, over 1 million matched credentialing decisions and 650+ devices in use (Wicket). The system is opt-in, with traditional entry kept as an alternative.

MLB took the same idea to the fan gate. Go-Ahead Entry, built on NEC gate technology, expanded in 2024 to the Giants, Astros and Nationals alongside the Phillies (Stadium Tech Report). The Brewers and Twins added it for 2025, with fans enrolling by uploading a selfie to the MLB Ballpark app (MLB.com). In Cleveland, 35,000 Browns fans enrolled and more than 10,000 entered by face on an average 2023 game day (ASIS Security Management).

Fans are split but open. Roughly half (49%) of fans surveyed in 2025 said facial recognition entry is useful to them (Capgemini Research Institute).

Three patterns now define sports credentialing:

AI is now working at every layer of a sporting event: the gate, the concourse, the broadcast and the phone in the fan's hand. Fans are ahead of many organizers. In a 2025 survey of 12,017 fans across 11 countries, 54% said they had switched from traditional search to AI tools for sports information, and 59% said they trust AI-generated sports content (Capgemini Research Institute).

Source: Capgemini Research Institute, Beyond the game (2025).

The most practical AI in US venues removes friction. Cashierless, computer-vision concessions are moving into the mainstream, with AiFi running a cashierless store at State Farm Arena and Amazon's Just Walk Out operating in NFL stadiums (Foley & Lardner, 2026). Verizon's 2025 stadium connectivity report flagged a sharp rise in generative AI adoption inside venue operations. Foley's forecast for 2026 to 2028 is that generative AI becomes the venue's "experience router," not a trivia chatbot.

Leagues are using AI to turn each fan's behavior into personal content. The NFL and Adobe expanded their partnership in 2025 so fans can create team-themed content with Adobe Express and Firefly, and so the NFL OnePass app can serve tailored highlights and offers (Capgemini Research Institute). The ICC's Champions Trophy 2025 sent every fan a personalized recap of their predictions and votes after the tournament, a digital souvenir built from their own participation.

Milano Cortina 2026 set the global marker. The IOC announced the first official large language model in Olympic history, built on Alibaba's Qwen, powering an Olympic AI Assistant for fans and supporting Games operations (China Daily). Olympic Broadcasting Services added AI-driven 360-degree replays, real-time curling stone tracking and automated clipping of highlight moments (Dealroom, summarizing Wired). Inside the Athletes' Village, an AI pin-trading station using gesture and speech recognition became a social hub, turning an old Olympic ritual into an interactive experience (Daily News Botswana).

Paris 2024 was the first large-scale legal test of AI video surveillance in the EU. France's 2023 Olympic Games Law authorized algorithmic analysis of camera feeds to flag eight event types, including crowd surges, abandoned objects and a person on the ground, while excluding facial recognition (Swissinfo, Reuters). The IOC also ran an AI system monitoring social media in 35+ languages to flag abuse aimed at athletes before they saw it (Capgemini Research Institute).

The biggest crowds in US sport now gather outside the stadium. The 2026 NFL Draft in Pittsburgh drew a record 805,000 attendees over three days, beating Detroit's 775,000 from 2024, and Washington, D.C. is targeting one million in 2027 (Fox News Outkick). Some reporting notes the count includes repeat entries to the perimeter (The Ticketing Business), which itself shows how much these sites depend on access and counting technology.

The same shift played out at the World Cup. FIFA Fan Festivals operated for a combined 348 days across 13 host cities, screened all 104 matches, and hosted more than 873 musical acts (Fox 5 Atlanta, citing FIFA). Content captured at the festivals earned 811 million video views across 200 posts on FIFA channels (FIFA). The festival was a media engine as much as a gathering.

The strongest sports activations of 2025 and 2026 share four traits:

Fans want to be in the moment, not just near it. 63% of fans say they would like to compete virtually against a well-known player during a live game (Capgemini Research Institute). The same research found that more than half worry that excessive technology dilutes the authenticity of live sport. The winning formula puts the fan at the center and keeps the technology out of the way.

The US is in the middle of an unbroken sequence of global events, from Super Bowl LX and the World Cup in 2026 to the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Each one is raising expectations for credentialing, AI and fan experience that will carry into corporate and B2B events.

The World Cup proved that accreditation is now a distributed operation, not a single desk. FIFA ran central media and stakeholder accreditation, while each host city procured its own Fan Festival accreditation vendor and integrated it with local security and site design. It also showed the political exposure of credential data. In Los Angeles, labor and immigrant rights groups challenged the personal information FIFA required from SoFi Stadium workers, and a complaint alleged violations of the California Consumer Privacy Act (NBC Los Angeles).

The Super Bowl LX Experience is a useful template for any branded event. The activations that drew lines produced something personal: a printed poster, a robot-drawn portrait, a video of a fan's own touchdown dance (Event Marketer). The team that owns that output, from capture to print to delivery, owns the memory.

LA28 is the first Olympic organizer to sign AI as part of a top-tier founding partnership. Google will provide cloud infrastructure, Gemini and AI Mode in Search to support Games operations and fan discovery during NBCUniversal's coverage (Google). Rapiscan will supply AI-enabled screening hardware and access control technology (LA28). Expect LA28 to define the US standard for AI-assisted entry and fan service through the end of the decade.

Outside the US, the pattern is the same but the regulatory frame is tighter. European events have proven AI at scale while operating under GDPR and, increasingly, the EU AI Act. That makes them the best preview of the constraints US organizers will eventually face.

Paris remains the reference point for credentialing volume. The Games issued more than 400,000 Olympic and 240,000 Paralympic accreditations and processed 3.7 million access-control scans, all coordinated by IOC technology partner Atos (The Sports Examiner). Venues were equipped with IoT sensors, Wi-Fi and 5G so fans could pull live stats, replays and athlete information (Capgemini Research Institute).

The IOC framed Milano Cortina as its most intelligent Games. AI-powered Olympic Assistants built on Alibaba's Qwen served both fans and Olympic organizations, and the same technology now powers personalized AI audio guides at the Olympic Museum in Lausanne (Context.ph). Omega deployed a ring of 14 8K cameras in figure skating that feeds an AI model measuring airtime, jump height and blade angle (Interesting Engineering).

Wimbledon's 2025 move to electronic line calling ended a 148-year tradition of human line judges (Technology Magazine). On the fan side, IBM's Match Chat let fans ask an AI assistant questions in real time during live singles matches. The lesson for organizers: when AI is accurate and visible, even the most traditional audiences accept it.

The technology works. What slows adoption is trust: in how identity data is collected, how AI is used, and whether the experience still feels human. Four risks stand out for 2026 and beyond.

US rules remain a patchwork. Illinois amended its Biometric Information Privacy Act in August 2024 so damages accrue per person rather than per scan, and added electronic consent (Davis Wright Tremaine). In April 2026 the Seventh Circuit held the amendment applies retroactively, though BIPA litigation risk remains (Sidley Austin). Civil liberties advocates have called for stadium facial recognition to be opt-in only, with a convenient alternative, prompt deletion and no sharing with law enforcement absent a warrant (The Register).

Credentialing data is also political. The World Cup accreditation dispute in Los Angeles showed that the personal information collected to print a worker's badge can become a public controversy (NBC Los Angeles).

France's Olympic algorithmic video surveillance came with tight conditions. The Paris police commissioner had to end the authorization immediately if the conditions justifying it lapsed, and the presence of monitoring cameras had to be signposted for the public (BCLP). The program also sits alongside the EU AI Act's transparency obligations. Global organizers must design for the strictest regime they operate in.

In Capgemini's 2025 survey, 57% of fans agreed excessive technology could compromise the authenticity of sport, and 53% said overuse has diminished the fun of live viewing (Capgemini Research Institute). Many fans also cannot say what data is collected from them or how long it is kept. Technology that is invisible and optional performs better than technology that demands attention.

Mega-events now run accreditation through central systems, host-city vendors, security partners and event management companies at once. Boston's World Cup host committee had to integrate its accreditation vendor with the event management company so credentials matched the site access design and security policy (GoFractional). Every hand-off is a point where data, print stock or access rules can fall out of sync.

Leagues and organizing committees run the gates. Brands run the moments fans remember. Sponsorship rights buy a brand access to the audience, but the activation is where that access turns into participation, content and data, and the activation is the part the brand owns and budgets for itself.

That budget is large and growing. Global experiential marketing spending rose 8.3% to $138.94 billion in 2025 and is forecast to grow 10.3% in 2026, with Olympic and World Cup sponsors named as a key driver (Inside Radio, citing PQ Media).

Source: Inside Radio, citing PQ Media's Global B2C and B2B Experiential Marketing Forecast 2026 to 2030.

Between now and LA28, the winning sports events will treat credentialing, AI and experience as one connected fan journey rather than three separate vendor contracts. The badge, the gate, the activation and the souvenir all draw on the same identity and the same data, and the organizers who connect them will own the relationship with the fan.

Gramercy Tech already runs the full stack these trends describe, from arrival to activation, for enterprise brands such as UPS, Google and Delta. The table maps each stage of the sports fan journey to the relevant Gramercy Tech capability.

The proof point that travels best from corporate events to sport is participation. At UPS, Seek drove about 35% attendee participation with zero manual adjudications, and the platform won Best AI for Attendee Engagement at the Event Technology Awards AI Edition. Sports organizers are chasing exactly that outcome: fans who take part, create something personal and leave with it.

All sources were published between 2024 and October 2026. Survey and attendance figures are as reported by each source.