Last year was a big year for my mother’s family ? the last relatives living in Wisconsin moved across state borders. Starting when my mom and her siblings left for college, the family spread out across the U.S. and now lives between four and 16 hours away from Green Bay. There’s one thing they took with them after leaving the house on Division Street: an abiding love for the Green Bay Packers. 

My family is probably what Johnny Boyd would call “global fans,” the sports fans starting in the mid-20th century who had the technology to follow their hometown team despite migrating across state lines (or perhaps across the world). We trek to Lambeau Field once or twice a year; I take a photo each time next to the stadium tile commemorating my grandfather, a longtime team stockholder (“Front row dad, front row granddad, back row seats”). 

I kept thinking about this personal history while listening to Boyd, Shive Hattery’s director of sports and recreation, on Sept. 18 during the company’s Sports & Athletic Facility Conference at Jack Trice Stadium. Barely a few days after the Cyclones-Hawks showdown, Boyd and Noah Diemer, sports architectural designer, delivered the news to conference attendees that the basics of fan bases are changing. 

“The age of the fluid fan is quickly surpassing the age of the global fan,” Diemer said. 

These are the fans who follow the data, not the legacy brand. They’re fans of Christian Yeliech, Tom Brady or LeBron James ? and if any of those players jump ship on the team, the fans will follow them, Diemer and Boyd said.

One way that transition shows up is in stadium sizes. From the 1950s onward, stadiums had a growth spurt leading to seating for 60,000 through 90,000 at the height. Yet today, fans have the choice to turn to high-definition TV or stream a game through Reddit if they live in a blackout zone.

“[Stadiums are] really still the dominant revenue-generating model today ? people are building bigger, bigger and bigger, but the fans aren’t necessarily showing up,” Diemer said. “There are other ways to reach that fan base.” 

Engagement in fans is arriving through data points obsessive fans track ? the career highlights of individual players or coaches ? and the successful franchises in the future will have mastered control of delivering fans that engagement. 

The San Francisco 49ers released a mobile app a while back to address both sides of the game day experience: live programming for the fans unwilling to leave home or the bar, but with features designed to smooth over traditional stadium woes, including finding open parking, ticket management and remote-ordering concessions to avoid lines (I wish Lambeau would do that). According to Diemer, about $2 million in revenue from 2016 to 2018 can be attributed to the app’s success. 

Of course, an app will never deliver a Kroll’s West butter burger to my couch in Iowa, and newcomers might not find the tailgater’s shotski if they were directed to the most efficient parking in the first place. I don’t mind the hassle.