SBJ Tech: USL enlists a new official ticketing platform

My mother has a tradition for her grandchildren: Their birthday present is a shopping spree and a meal, just one-on-one. My son recently became old enough for his first outing with her, and he returned with two Nerf guns, two lightsabers and a slew of other projectiles.

I write this while hiding behind my sofa, and I think I can stay back here a while until he gets bored and/or distracted.

The USL has a new official ticketing platform in Vivenu, a move expected to be announced by the league on Thursday morning. Terms of the deal were not disclosed to SBJ.

No outside firm brokered the deal. The relationship between the two parties has ramped up over the last few years. Vivenu now works with 70 clients (17 on the professional side and 53 others in the pre-professional groups).

The league and Vivenu have worked together since 2024, with the startup first getting involved with the USL’s pre-professional sides. Josh Keller, the USL’s EVP/corporate development, said that because of its shorter summer season, a turnkey solution provided the most ease for those lower-level teams. Eventually, it became clear that Vivenu would be a fit for the larger clubs, too.

“At a league level, having an official partnership with Vivenu allows us better reporting, fan profiling and purchase behavior,” Keller said. “We’re getting that type of data and working with them at a league level and more to share best practices out with our teams.”

While Vivenu has manifested in U.S. sports mostly with colleges — the company works with Stanford, Cornell and Abilene Christian — its first customer anywhere was large German club FC Schalke 04 (Vivenu is HQed out of Düsseldorf). Keal Blache, Vivenu’s VP/global partnership and strategy, pointed out that the company has gotten steady reps in working with the clubs to grow revenue.

Blache mentioned that Athletic Club Boise, which is fielding both a men’s and women’s team in the USL system (this year and next year, respectively), as an example of a club capitalizing on new-franchise intrigue by having the right platform in place. AC Boise has seen more than 7,000 season ticket commitments (Les Bois Stadium, the club’s home venue, seats just over 7,200) as the men’s program readies for its first season of USL League One play. AC Boise was able to pivot from season-ticket deposits to waitlist quickly. The team’s sales and marketing also had better access to ticketing data to create more bespoke outreach.

“This is a prevalent story across all industries right now, but sports too,” Blache said. “It’s how technology is empowering smaller teams to do a lot more, and do it well. That’s what our tech is allowing like what AC Boise was able to do ... Something that would have taken, typically, a team of three or four times the size of team that they had the past, but they were able to execute on it because of the technology.”

Earlier this week, RightsHelper launched as a ticketing/operations solution from TWG Global, the holding company led by chairman Mark Walter and co-chairman Thomas Tull. Walter has seen his ownership in sports grow into a worldwide portfolio that includes the Dodgers, Lakers, Sparks, Chelsea FC and the PWHL.

The tech journey for RightsHelper stemmed from the Dodgers’ 2018 decision to move away from brokers and develop a path to more ticketing revenue. Royce Cohen, the Dodgers SVP/business strategy, said the organization found itself navigating the build-vs.-buy intersection, and after pursuing all avenues (even acquiring an existing platform), the Dodgers decided to go with the creative route.

“It’s one of the factors that led us to the name RightsHelper,” Cohen told me. “Built by rights holders for rights holders.”

True to that form, Cohen is a baseball lifer, starting as a Giants intern and pivoting to an MLB league office role in 2011 as the first hire of the league’s fledgling ticketing analytics division. It was a small powerhouse group that consisted of Cohen, Ryan Gustafson and Corey Ruff. Gustafson is now the president and CEO of Ilitch Sports + Entertainment, and Ruff is SVP/strategy and analytics and chief of staff for the Bears. (This is an example of perhaps my favorite thing about the sports industry: People who worked early on together who all went on to hold big positions later.)

That initial deployment became Demand Analytics, which grew out of the Dodgers and found clients throughout the league (more than 10 MLB teams used it) and a handful of others in different leagues. Demand Analytics focused on pricing insights and forecasting.

RightsHelper is a turbo-charged version of this, bringing sales forecasting, dynamic pricing, and modeling. Packaging these functions in one place enabled operators to determine how a bobblehead promotion may impact attendance and the money connected to it, how to staff different parts of the stadium, and if entry lanes need adjusting on game day.

More capabilities are coming to RightsHelper, with a priority on injecting more efficiency with the help of TWG AI. Cohen can see a boost coming for inventory management — something that is tedious, but especially for the Dodgers with 81 home games and the largest MLB stadium (capacity is approximately 56,000). Cohen hopes that AI can also shorten the onboarding process for future clients who deploy RightsHelper’s software.

“So just start with the basic calibration of a platform,” Cohen said. “Right now, it takes us probably eight weeks as our onboarding timeline for full-on deployment. I don’t know if AI is going to condense that down to a week or two, but that’s the goal, right?”

A final thought

There are so many diversified portfolios in sports now, either spanning a few U.S. leagues or, like Walter’s, stretching across the globe. I’ve noticed more work toward and interest in bespoke/self-built solutions popping up to enhance the continuity across the full organizational spectrum.

I brought this thought up to Cohen, who agreed, going as far as to say that recently he scanned through a deck on the top 20 multi-property sports teams, and almost all of them had at least one other business outside of a sports team/sports portfolio.

That could be media, consulting, recruiting, sales, etc. Technology is poised to become a growing factor in all of that. “I do anticipate that to continue,” Cohen said. “It’s a trend, not just an anomaly, not a blip.”

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