The new football season has started and we have fans back in the stadiums. What a difference a year makes. But despite the appearance of life getting back to some sort of normality we have had to pivot and adjust to achieve this. Part of this has been to gain a clearer understanding of who is in your stadium, when and where at any given point.

But how do you achieve this, how do you ensure you are able to track each person?

Why should we be tracking everyone?

Before we start looking at how to achieve this perhaps it would be good to look at why we would need to track everyone, after all it does sound very Brave New World-esque.

There is good reason for it, accreditation has expanded from protecting against terrorism, criminal activity and insider threats to include health security. This addition is in direct response to the threat COVID-19 poses.

This new addition of health security can be split into three parts. Firstly knowing the health status of each member of your workforce, secondly the ability to identify who has been in close proximity with each other for track and tracing capabilities and thirdly having the ability to control access for individuals based on their job requirements.

This new knowledge will complement what accreditation has been doing for years. Namely looking to ensure each staff member or contractor is eligible to work at the venue and does not pose a significant security threat to the running of an event. Confidence around the safety of the event environment is then built which benefits every stakeholder: management, staff, contractors and the fans/attendees.

How do we get there?

To mitigate against any incident occurring in your stadium, whether it is health, terrorism or other, you will want to gain access to the relevant information as quickly as possible. This can be achieved by having the right processes, zoning and technology in place.

Processes

Accreditation takes time regardless of the size of the stadium in question. Larger clubs may have an accreditation coordinator on hand to run and administer the entire process. Smaller clubs rely on staff already there, such as the stadium management or the security and safety teams, to complete the process.

Regardless of the size of the club, accreditation often results in different departments, or external stakeholders, submitting their own spreadsheets in varying degrees of completion and formatting or submitting requests via email.

A better way would be to have a single system where the departments and stakeholders such as the catering contractors can submit their temporary catering staff list, the security contractor can submit their security staff and stewards list and so on.

The single system allows for uniformity and centralisation of all the data, making the whole process far more time and resource friendly. All stakeholders get a dedicated portal to load data and photos, the portal also allows for the re-use of relevant data match to match, the ability to build an audit trail and history on each individual. Ultimately it puts the onus on the departments, stakeholders and contractors to collect the information.

This allows the accreditation, security and safety teams to concentrate on the actual accreditation of the individuals, granting access and printing a badge for only those that do not pose a security or health risk.

Zoning

The second part is to ensure you have the right zoning in place. Does each member of your workforce need access to all areas of your stadium? If not, then successfully incorporating access control allows each individual only into the areas they need to complete their job function. For instance, a member of the kiosk catering team does not need access to the pitch, the tunnel or the dressing room.

Technology

The cornerstone of onsite personnel tracking. With the right solution in place, you can maximise the time and resources you invest in processes and zoning. The right technology will allow you to set access areas for each person and then allow or deny them access as they move through the stadium. The right access control will stop them from opening doors to areas they shouldn’t be accessing.

The information you need at your fingertips

Understanding who is in your stadium and where will guard against terrorist, criminal and insider threats as well as the current health threat we are all too aware of. It is because of this very reason we have invested heavily in developing industry-leading solutions that allow you to do just this, set access limits, have real-time updates and retrospective reports. All of this will help you in the long run to have a safe and secure stadium ready for all to enjoy.

If you would like to know more, please get in touch.