 Here in San Francisco at the AT&T part for a special Cube edition of Sports Big Data SV, where we're profiling the use of big data in sports from managing the organization, the team and fan experience. Our next guest is Dave Cavill, president of the Earthquakes here in San Jose, a new stadium, great land grab for you from a technology standpoint, complete clean sheet of paper, great sport. Tell us about what's happening. Director, give us the quick update on the stadium and what's going on. Well, it's a really exciting time for the organization. We have a $100 million stadium that's coming to life in the middle of Silicon Valley. It couldn't be a more exciting time for soccer as well with all the fans and interest in the English Premier League, Major League Soccer. And so many of those young fans are really demanding a high technology fan experience. And I feel that we are creating a stadium that's going to provide that for them. So we couldn't be more excited about the stadium. It's going to be done in November. And then we're going to open up the stadium in March of next year with our first game. And it should be just a great, it's 18,000 seats, about 20 suites, 1,000 club seats, great European design. It's got a roof, really good feel to it. It feels like you're in England. Will it be shaken when people are screaming? I don't know if it will shake, but hopefully it won't shake because it's supposed to be earthquake for them. But there is going to be an all-standing supporter section in one of the end zones. And that's going to be for 1906 Ultras. Our CASPA are really hardcore supporters. And they stand and cheer and have T-foam and flags and banners and everything through the whole game. Share your vision of what to expect with the new fan experience, the organization. I mean, you've got a new stadium that's going to breathe new life into the organization, fan base. What's your vision for the innovation strategy for your organization? Well, we're very much focused on the fan experience and making sure that the technology supports it. We're not into technology just for technology's sake. I don't maybe have the fastest router switch or whatever. I really don't even care about that. What I care about is creating technology to enable great fan experiences, whether it's someone posting a Vine video or someone actually getting a picture that they post on Facebook. Whatever it is, I want to have the technology infrastructure to support that and create a seamless experience, whether it's in social media, commerce, walking into the stadium with your actual phone as a ticket, or whether it's something related to actually even the performance of the players on the field, seeing their heart rate, seeing, you know, their biometric data, things like that that really can be a differentiator for our sport. So it sounds like you're going to be creative, too, and new experiences. Can you share some of that? I mean, that's one of the big things with soccer and with our league. You know, we're kind of an upstart league. And so we have to try new things to kind of challenge the MLB or NFL. And so one of the things that we can do is to be more nimble and to try new things and basically innovate with a lot of the things we've done. And we've done that today. You know, we've done a lot of stuff with Google Glass out of the gate. You know, we were an alpha partner with Google on that, and we got the glass out there. We actually did our draft on this last year in Philadelphia with the Google Glasses, which was kind of a cool thing, and allowed people to kind of follow myself and the experience of being at the draft table like you were there. And so things like that that are really unique and different are things that we're trying to push the envelope. Talk about, you know, you mentioned or touched on your answer to your first question around just your general philosophy around technology. I mean, we hear a lot about, you know, technology and IT departments. I mean, you know, keep the lights on, keep things running versus innovate. How do you look at the role of technology in running your organization? I see it as an enabler. You know, I see it as something that creates a better fan experience. A third of our fans are millennials. They're folks that are only really connected with mobile on their cell phones. And so you need to make sure that you're creating an environment where they can do a tweet and they can interact and actually have contests and have an experience that's different at our venue or they'll turn off or they won't be interested. So I think it's important. Soccer is a sport where people watch the game. They're very focused on the game when it occurs. But by the same token, we want to make sure that we have the infrastructure. And we have, you know, we partnered with Ruckus Wireless to create, you know, Cadillac level Wi-Fi system or maybe it's a Tesla level, that's the right terminology these days. And Wi-Fi system in our stadium that's going to really enable everyone in our building to access the internet, use apps, make sure that the experience can be everything that it's cracked up to be. Because I think so many stadiums these days you go to, even if you have Wi-Fi it doesn't really work because it's too many people and there's too much access. So we feel like we have a system that works. One, two, we have a system that, you know, I think will create a lot of exciting experiences for our fans. So let's talk a little bit about the way you're using data to kind of improve the product on the field. I mentioned in our kind of our intro this evening, you know, I think baseball was probably one of the first sports that got a lot of attention with Moneyball around using data to do better scouting and things like that. I'm curious, how does it play out in soccer? Soccer you think of, I think in soccer I think, well there's not nearly as many statistics are there because, you know, there's a lot of action but not a lot of, you know, things where you can, you know, dot an I across the game and there's, you know, discrete statistics. What's the, am I right there? Well, no, you're absolutely right. I think the challenge with soccer has been it's a continuous flow of sport. It's the most continuous flow of sport. There are virtually no, you know, it goes the whole time. So because of that, you need to be very savvy and innovative about how you create discrete events that can be monitored, that can be kind of a deterministic variable. So when you're actually running analysis, regressions, looking for algorithms that predict behavior, it works. And I think the hardest thing, what the group called OPTA, which actually does, takes every game and basically creates 180 variables around every soccer player during every match. Key passes, goals, second passes, all these kind of things. But there's still some subjectivity to it because how do you define a key pass? What does that mean? So like, you worry that even in that you're injecting some bias that can cloud the results. Now that doesn't mean that we're still not trying to use this data to determine workshops, how do you set pieces. There's certain things that we mind and we actually do forecasting for the upcoming opponent using these tools. And I don't think everyone does that, but we're trying to use it as best we can to give our coaches and staff an answer. Well, it's interesting, you kind of touched on what I think is a really important point when it comes to using data. It's not just a science, it's an art as well. You need people who understand that. That it's not just a matter of crunching some numbers. There's a lot of interpretation and a lot of care has to be taken when you're determining some of these variables. Yeah, and so what we've tried to do is you can look at really discreet things like where does a player normally kick a free kick? Where does they kick on a penalty kick? Things like that so I can sit down my goalie and say hey, if Landon Donovan comes up he always goes to the right. Those are very first order things. What we want to be better at is like hey, what if we had a formation? What if we had a 4-4-2 formation as opposed to a 3-5-1 formation or some different formation based on certain players that the other team might have or a certain point of the game or something they do. So those are the more higher order things that we're trying to work through that we're trying to obviously make advance in some way. So we're getting some trolls already coming through here. One obviously following baseball with 65 zillions sellouts in a row. Someone says can you please explain so hey, stop trolling. I don't really think it's that confusing. Like I can even follow up. Alternative programming is really the key for you guys, right? So all kinds of new ways to get sticky with the users. New fantasy ways, lineups, other things. We heard Bill from the giant talk about ticketing, arbitrage, dynamic pricing, he called it arbitrage. What are you guys doing differently? For instance, are you guys looking at things like Bitcoin? We are and so actually we are going to in May, if you are looking at Bitcoin, we're actually going to start taking Bitcoin at our stadium both for merchandise and hopefully concessions as well but we'll start with merchandise and I think that'll be a nice obviously appropriate way right in the middle of Silicon Valley with a lot of very tech savvy and tech forward fans to kind of you know adapt to the most recent innovations that are out there and really create a seamless and experience for fans as we can. And that relates to everything related to commerce because I think when we look at our new stadium and building that in San Jose we want to have a commerce experience that's seamless where you can use your phone basically for everything. Your phone is your ticket and we have a great partnership with Tickets.com to create that experience where you can have an app and it can use basically a barcode on it you scan it, you walk right in. Or maybe you know when you just approach the stadium we'll use passbook with Apple and it just prompts you, hey, you know get out kind of your boarding pass or ticket for the game, walk right through. You know all sorts of things are seamless. It means people get in the stadium quicker, the operations are simpler and actually for fans it's simpler. You don't need to have an actual printed ticket. You can still have one if you want to if that's like a memento but for some fans we just want to streamline the experience and make it easier. One of the beautiful things we're seeing with the connected internet since the iPhone came out really kind of as the watershed moment since then cloud computing is alternative to distribution. So you know we saw things that were never covered on TV before like the space jump. The shuttle flying over Silicon Valley, everyone took the day off at work. A lot of geeks who like science and millions of people watching. So the question is, is it more of a vertical media strategy for you? Are those cast a wide net? Or are you targeting your base and then it gets to keep them there and go out from there? What's the approach that you guys want to take on enabling that? Well you know we obviously want more fans and more new fans for the earthquakes. You know we play one game every season at Stanford Stadium. We have 50,000 people who come to the match. It's our California classical against the Galaxy. That's exposed us to a lot more fans. We have a 40 year history. The club's been around since 1974. We're celebrating our 40th anniversary. All those things create a lot of people who have been casual about the earthquakes and it's about creating them and giving them a reason to be more connected. Whether it's our players or whether it's technology. Technology can be a reason if you live in Cupertino or Palo Alto or Belmont. Why do you want to be associated with the quakes as opposed to some other entertainment property? Whether it's another sports team or just going to the movies or whatever. Hey if it's tech forward, if it's exciting, if it's some I can access on my cell phone, if the players are more accessible. All those things give reasons why you'd want to connect and be an avid fan of the earthquakes. So how are you guys using data to attract say the non-tech savvy fans and other examples where you guys look at data. You have a unique situation. You have 40 year history. That's great. Now you got a clean sheet of paper at the new stadium. Tell us what you're building and what you're doing with data. What's innovative? What's competitive advantage for you guys? What's going to drive the bottom line? One thing that we're really spending a lot of time with is we have a business intelligence unit and data scientists who are really focused on taking the information of all the soccer fans out there. Whether or not they went to a U.S. men's national game an FMF game, a Mexican national team and basically bringing them together around the earthquakes and really creating a connection to our brand and making sure that they're experiencing our product and being able to market to them really one on one. And we're even going to the level and we do this not only on the player side but also with actual fans to linguistically look at the language that they use online. So take someone's tweets Facebook pokes, you know reviews on, you know, whatever social media, things like that or on Yelp and say, hey what type of personality is this person at and how do we tailor our communications to them based on that. So we'll create a personality profile. We did that with the draft this year on the actual player side. We looked at the players, we were looking at the top five guys and we actually evaluated kind of their personality using the linguistics they use on Twitter, on Facebook. It's more than the social graph, it's really trying to get at who they are The interest grant. Kind of, yeah, exactly and put that together in a way where you can determine, hey, do these kids fit our brand and what we're trying to do or the culture in our organization. And you can do the same thing with fans. And so I think that's a really innovative new way to kind of approach marketing where it's really a one-to-one situation. So expand on that a little bit when it comes to obviously, you know, soccer is I guess you might say, you know it's growing in popularity in the US, but obviously it's got a longer heritage in Europe. How does where do we stand in terms of building that fan base in the US and how are you using technology to kind of create momentum around, maybe not just the earthquakes, maybe the whole league. How are you kind of getting soccer on the radar for American sportsmen? Well, our league has done a lot of great things and I sit on the digital committee and I said that at the league level, really looking at how to connect to the millennials like Gen Y, even Gen Z. Because for the first time ever and it's kind of appropriate to be here at AT&T Park to say this, when you take people who are from 2012 to 28, that group for the first time, their interest level in soccer was higher than Asia League Baseball. So I think the wave is coming and I think a lot of times, you don't realize because, you know, we're not in a room here with a bunch of kids who are 17 that they really love playing FIFA and they grew up playing soccer and they watch, you know, the EPL and La Liga and Syria and they're exposed to the international nature of our sport and their way to connect to where America is to MLS that is a great advantage that we have and we are just going to focus as much resources as we can to kind of create a lifestyle around it where someone says, hey, you know, they see me, like I have my Earth Base jacket on, I'm walking down the street, they know it's like a soccer thing, it's almost like a little bit of an inside handshake deal, you know. So do you get data on the youth soccer, and certainly in Palo Alto where I live, very popular in the Bay Area again, the youth leagues exploding, travel teams are, you know, busting out everywhere, what's it like nationally, and do you get that data, do you source that youth data? Yeah, we get data, we have partnerships with, you know, AYSO CYSA, all the major organizations and we actually market, co-market with them and, you know, for them, we have clinics where our earthquake players are there and teach them how to play soccer and we have an academy that goes all the way down to 8 year olds where I'm actually trying to find good young talent here in the United States and develop it we don't have a farm system like baseball does or some of these other things it's completely vertically integrated into major league soccer and so these academy systems are a way for all these young kids to look up like hey, you're 12 years old you know, the kid McKay is the best kid in your class and the best athlete, he plays in the Earthquakes Academy, that makes you more likely to say, hey, I want to be an Earthquakes fan because, you know, he's the best athlete, he's playing for the Earthquakes Academy that's where all the great kids go and so that connection at that youth level is very powerful in terms of creating a connection to our sport and that's happening throughout our league and throughout the United States at camp. So I heard a rumor that you guys are having a game at Levi's stadium? This is true, we're having the first game there on August 2nd. We have some folks here from the Niners organization, Doug Garland will come on shortly so is that going to be your first game prior to your stadium? Well it's just the first game at Levi's stadium ever, so basically you know, so you know, we have the inaugural game so, you know, we're the giddy payouts to make sure everything goes okay all the toilets flush okay and all that kind of stuff. Okay, so I got to ask about your stadium, what is the coolest thing about your stadium that you're most excited about? Geekwise data, technology could be office, team, fan experience what is the, some of the cool things? I think the, one I really like the supporters area which is an all standing area, supporter seat, the only one in North America with all standing, safe standing seats, the other thing that I think is going to be so cool is we have a scoreboard bar and so this scoreboard bar is the largest exterior bar in North America, 407 linear square feet of bar space so it'll be the largest in America, you can sit there and look out, you know, it's kind of in the end zone and watch the game and you can sit there and be tweeting and being connected to everything that's happening there and so we're trying to create these neighborhoods at our ballpark or a stadium like a ballpark where people can have shared experiences connect to the sport use technology to do that, whatever it might be for them and we think that'll create a very powerful fan experience. And that's a destination Oh yeah, you want to be the largest bar I mean, come on Of course I meant the bar 40 beers on tap, I mean it's going to be amazing Let the wife drive home Yeah, exactly, Uber, Uber can sponsor They never made it home So what is here is just a little bit So you mentioned you've got data scientists on staff doing things with data, based on kind of player data. Let's talk a little bit about how you go about building out that kind of staff, that kind of talent. There's a lot of talk out there around the lack of data scientists and people with that kind of analytic skill to really crunch data and make sense of it. You know, they kind of need the business acumen but also the statistical capability et cetera. How do you go about actually I guess both organizing kind of your data talent inside organization and how do you go about actually finding these people? Well we've had the people come to us, I mean so like basically, you know, you've got these PhDs at Stanford and they're all into sports and they're not kind of my door to do a project on players, on what the optimal ticket price should be on a variety of different variables around what we're trying to accomplish. And so, we've really leveraged our location in Silicon Valley and the universities like Stanford and Santa Clara. We currently play on Santa Clara's campus to get really good thought leadership in this area. But I put a guy on top of that group, Richard who really has good judgment about soccer and about just sports management, because I think a lot of times if you put someone who's just a strict data scientist, they may not know, have the judgment, kind of the art part to make it all work. So you want to balance that out. So you want that give and take happening in that department so we can kind of create algorithms and data that makes sense for what we're trying to accomplish. Okay, well it's my final question is, what are you most excited about and what would you share to the folks watching about your experience doing the technology and essentially, I mean, it's a new building, it's a new field, it's a new facility, it's like a data center, it's going to be like a building. A lot of tech involved, you've been overseeing it. What would you share as best practices, things you've learned, speed bumps you've hit along the way, and also being a leader with the innovation strategy? Well, I mean, I think you need to be open to trying a lot of new things. And I think you need to be prepared to fail and you need to understand that there's going to be a lot of technologies you try to adopt that might not work. And that's part, comes with the territory. And you need to be willing to put yourself out there and potentially take those risks when fans could be upset when you launch a product that doesn't work that well. Because that's the only way you're going to really use your stadium as almost a laboratory. And so I think that's a really key thing to be successful. I think in terms of overseeing the whole project, I really have seen getting the Wi-Fi right and the connectivity right is critical. If you don't get that right, all the applications and everything you do that sits on top of that will fail. And I think we've all been in stadiums where you can't send a text message. That kind of thing has to end. Yeah, it's really, yeah, you don't even want to go. And like, oh, your kids, you know, they're out with their cell phone, they're 14, you can't reach them, meet me at what location, it's totally archaic. And so that problem going in our stadium, that was the thing we did not want to have. We said, no matter what, we're not going to have that issue. And then we're going to have applications on top of the system and infrastructure to be successful. Do you think everyone will be doing a selfie at the stadium? I think so. Yeah, maybe Elegy Generous will come. That'd be fantastic. We'll invite her. Dave, thanks for coming on the Q. Really appreciate it. Best of luck. We'll be keeping in touch. We want to follow your progress. We'll pop down, see you again. We'll sit at that bar. I'm dying to see it now. You got our attention in that late in the day. Thanks so much for coming on the Q. This is a special edition of Sports and Big Data here live in San Francisco. This Q will be right back with our next guest after this short break.