The Hidden Data Story Behind Super Bowl Tickets
Vivid Seats’ “Fan Forecast” has correctly predicted the last five Super Bowls. What’s the secret?
The Super Bowl is traditionally the single biggest live event of the year, transcending typical sporting events to become a cultural phenomenon. It’s a bit of a winter rite of passage for many Americans and includes annual tropes that have become familiar even to those who are not sports fans:
- Tom Brady.
- The Patriots.
- Demand for Super Bowl tickets.
For the first time in years, the Patriots and their future Hall of Fame quarterback weren’t part of the annual NFL conversation in February, as the Chiefs emerged from the AFC to take on the NFC champion San Francisco 49ers. Yet despite the Patriots’ elimination in the first round of the 2020 playoffs, demand for Super Bowl tickets was stronger than ever. [1]
At Vivid Seats, a Chicago-based ticket marketplace, we’re constantly seeking new ways to tell interesting stories with our data — a robust mix of insights surrounding live events from sports and concerts to theater performances and more.
Even though the Super Bowl captures so much of the country’s attention, visualizing the price of Super Bowl tickets is as unexciting as it gets: a line chart that moves slightly over time.
When we consider visualizing data and telling stories around it, ticket price is low-hanging fruit. Whether we’re exploring the cheapest (“get-in”) price for the Super Bowl or the median listed price, price-driven stories are extremely surface level.
Sure, the COST of Super Bowl tickets is something that many fans and journalists are interested in, but we prefer to use our data to tell more compelling stories about the nature of live events, more specifically sporting events. For example, can our data tell us anything about the concept of homefield advantage and fan rivalries?
Using a tool that we call Fan Forecast, we absorb multiple data points and run them through a proprietary algorithm to project the makeup of the crowd at big neutral-site sporting events. In other words, which team will have more fans in attendance?
Which team will have the “home field” advantage at a neutral site?
Heading into this year’s Super Bowl we discovered that from Super Bowl 50 to Super Bowl LIII, the team with the crowd advantage won each Super Bowl. For Super Bowl LIV, our model indicated that the Chiefs would have nearly two-thirds of the crowd — a prohibitive advantage.
We normally visualize our Fan Forecasts with a pictogram chart shaded with the colors of the two teams to allow fans to easily see the concept simply by looking at the chart. Using colors to represent fan bases is something we do a lot of, particularly with our fan maps.
Whether we’re projecting crowds at a game or showcasing the geographic footprint of fan bases, our data visualizations draw people into deeper engagement — which is great for a digital experience but doesn’t translate as well with television broadcasts.
ESPN showed interest in our Fan Forecast data as part of their Super Bowl pre-game coverage, but they weren’t able to broadcast a screen shot of our site containing our pictogram. That meant we needed to communicate our data clearly and trust that our visualization was solid enough to allow numerous show producers, production staff and on-air talent to grasp it and re-purpose it into a format that works for television.
The result was a tabular chart, containing team logos (which are verboten in our visualizations) and the percentage of fans for each homefield-favored team for the past five Super Bowls — a much different visualization and a much different medium — but one that allowed us to reach a whole new audience. And it allowed ESPN to examine the game through a lens that had never been possible prior.
As the game got under way, with both teams wearing red, it was impossible to the naked eye to really ascertain who was rooting for who, and which team had the crowd advantage, though the Chiefs fan base certainly seemed to roar more loudly. Sure enough, the Chiefs won the game 31–20, extending the winning streak of Super Bowl teams with the previously-hidden crowd advantage to five.
Data visualization, if nothing else, is about revealing insights that otherwise remain unseen.
Stephen Spiewak leads content at Vivid Seats.
