Stepping into the air-conditioned Legends Lounge at Kansas City’s FIFA World Cup Fan Festival on a hot June day was a blessing.
The neatly appointed structure featured faux-hardwood floors, assorted greenery accenting the seating spaces, and a two-story atrium whose natural light illuminated glass cases containing the Kansas City Chiefs’ two Super Bowl trophies.
Another two-level structure sat adjacent, connected by a walkway. Its open-air second floor afforded sweeping views of the fan festival’s main viewing area and the stage, which featured performances by Flo Rida and the Chainsmokers or hordes of orange-clad Dutch fans.
What almost no one who bought access to the Legends Lounge would know was that weeks before, the very kit of parts that made that two-part edifice in Kansas City had been assembled to create a mega yacht at the F1 Miami Grand Prix, a massive multilevel premium space that would look right at home on the waters of Biscayne Bay.
Or that weeks after the K.C. fan festival ended, the structure’s components would be on the move again, this time to Queens for the U.S. Open Tennis Championships, where it will become a three-story ESPN production facility.
Temporary and modular structures’ importance to the sports industry has grown in tandem with the expansion of sports teams’ businesses and the mega events they now regularly host. The products being used to build temporary and modular structures are growing in sophistication and, in the case of interior finishes, luxury. These days, most fans would be hard-pressed to differentiate between temporary and permanent structures.
The industry’s creations range from 4Topps’ movable loge seating product — consisting of four chairs, a table and a floor plate (oh, and table hooks for purses) — to the 50-foot-tall F1 Super Yacht, to the 34,000-seat cricket stadium on Long Island, maybe the largest, temporary stadium ever created.
These structures are helping the sports industry achieve key goals, across all levels.
Already a longtime fixture of sports marketing activations, the temporary and modular structures market is supporting a modern sports industry in which teams have become sports and entertainment platforms and are hosting more major events not related to their core sport. Think Hard Rock Stadium, with the Miami Open tennis tournament and the F1 race, and leagues that annually produce one-off spectacle events, such as a baseball game at a rural NASCAR track.
These structures are enabling once-a-year events, such as open-wheel racing and golf and tennis tournaments, to level up their offering and capture more of fans’ seemingly unstoppable premium demand.
They’re helping college athletics cope — quickly and cheaply — with the sudden and desperate revenue hole it’s facing, while creating new naming-rights inventory. These concepts are assisting budding franchises and leagues in getting off the ground, such as USL club Lexington SC’s completely modular stadium.
Even as the finishes grow nicer, the beauty of these structures remains: They’re still just a kit of parts, possessing all the flexibility the sports world needs.
