Inside sport's technological Valhalla: a Presidential tour around the LA Clippers' Intuit Dome

0:04Hello and welcome to another episode of the Leaders Sport Business Podcast. the podcast about leaders in sport from leaders in sport. My name is James Emmett. I'm the editorial director here at Leaders. And with me, as ever, is my great good colleague, David Cushman. David, a fresh buzz on the head. That's a haircut. How are you? I'm very well, thanks, James. You say as ever, but it's been, feels like it's been a while. We've been out and about. We've Eastered. We've both Eastered. We have. We've Eastered well. That's a Christian holiday that we celebrate here in the UK. You've Eastered very well, haven't you?

0:41How dare you? How dare you? You've got a nice hair. You've had a nice Easter haircut. Yeah. And we're back refreshed and ready to go for what feels like the start of a new sports industry term to me. This is the best. I mean, I say it every year. April. I think T.S. Elliott called it the cruelest month. Wrong. Bang wrong. The coolest month. April and May. Yeah. The most aesthetically pleasing bit of the whole sports calendar. I think pretty sport. Yeah. The Masters. Yes. Well, there's one weekend which is the best sports weekend, which is the Masters. Obviously, you've got your flowers, you've got your azaleas, etc.

1:18Your beautiful green, green grass of Augusta. You've got the Grand National. Who doesn't like a horse going over a hedge? Yeah. Well, actually, quite a few people, as it turns out. There's some controversy about it. Yeah. And of course, the Tour of Flanders. Can I? The Ronde von Flanderen. Bless you. Also, I would throw in clay court tennis. Who? I love clay court tennis. Monte Carlo Masters. The Madrid Open is this week. We're on that run into the French Open. And it just looks so fantastic. Have you seen this, the latest wheeze from Ari Emanuel? Yeah. And his Endeavour WME Silver Lake Financial Bermuda Triangle.

2:03The gang. The new gang. What's happening here? Ari Emanuel is buying, has he bought, is buying two tennis tournaments, Madrid and Miami, that IMG have owned and operated for some time. Correct. And Ari Emanuel is buying them himself, personally. Yeah. And he's paying IMG, which he owns, money for them. Yeah. And do you have any insight on that? Is that in the same way that Chelsea women's team was bought by Chelsea overall for a bank statement value of 200 million? It basically increases the asset value and swells. You can borrow more money that way, right? Well, I wouldn't say it was identical, but there's definitely some shuffling around of assets going on, right, at the moment as that whole sort of corporate structure sort of unwinds and moves around.

3:01But there's a lot of interesting bits and pieces going on related to all of that. That's very interesting. So Egon Zender is the guy at Silver Lake who is Ari Emanuel's long time kind of financial advisor, I suppose, financial consigliere. I think Egon Zender is himself now in his own right an NFL owner. Is that? I think so. I think he's got a stake in the Vegas team. Perhaps I'm wrong. But I think that there is an argument for Egon Zender being one of the most creative people in the sports industry. The amount of flexible kind of, I think there are going to be case studies written about what's going on at the moment with Endeavour, the carve up and carve out of whatever that business is now known as.

3:46There's a lot of carving going on. But yeah, Ari Emanuel is leading the group that has acquired, as you say, not just the Miami tournament, which is played in the Miami Dolphins stadium and surrounding car parks, but also the Madrid tournament that is just getting underway this week at the Caja Magica. I beg your pardon? The Caja Magica in Madrid. Caja. Caja. Two of the 1 ,000 tournaments on the men's and women's tour. So, yeah, but it's back to where we started. You like the clay court. I just like the look of the clay courts. And if you think about, you know, there's the London Marathon this weekend.

4:28There's the Boston Marathon we just had a couple of days ago. Just aesthetically pleasing. Sports then. Monaco Grand Prix next month. It's all happening. That's next month. we've just had a swing of the middle eastern races haven't we on the old f1 yes bahrain yeah bahrain and saudi arabia last weekend and uh quick pit stop in miami in a week and a half time yeah very good anyway coming up on the show today we've got an interview with um gillian zucker who's the president of the la clippers the nba team one of the nba teams based out in los angeles gillian has been at the Clippers for pretty much the last decade.

5:06A transformative executive who's kind of spearheaded a lot of waves of change, I'd suggest, at the Clippers. When she took over, they were very much the second team in the city, in the shadow of the Lakers, didn't really have their own venue, didn't really have their own identity. They've since gone through, as I say, waves of change spearheaded by zucker and the newish owner steve bolmer newish um he came in uh as the owner in as zucker was already there um and they have become a very forward-thinking organization they've got this sort of bank of senior female executives at the top of this organization they did a very interesting innovative jersey sponsorship with bumble a few years ago they don't have that there anymore and of course recently they have opened up what is without question the most technologically advanced indoor arena in the u.s possibly in the world in the intuit dome which i went along to have a tour of a couple of weeks ago when i was stuck in LA because of the Heathrow fire, I made the most of my time and got down to the injury time.

6:30Anyway, we're going to be hearing from Gillian a little bit later. Yes, we're about 5 ,440 miles from LA as we record this. But you were there a few weeks ago, as you said, you had a look around. What was your sense of it? Because we've seen all the, you know, for those who haven't been, seen all the pictures, seen the incredible footage from inside and outside the Intuit Dome. What is it like? It's amazing, Dave. And actually, it's sort of symbolic of the city as a whole at the moment, I would say now, in terms of the investment and development into staggering sports venues that has happened over the last few years.

7:11It's not just Intuit Dome. Intuit Dome sits on the same kind of patch uh hollywood part as sofi stadium which is the gigantic um american football stadium home to the rams and the chargers currently the the cronky sports entertainment built um venue uh and also cosm which is this amazing i mean it's it's kind of like imax for sport this amazing they're not necessarily impressive from the outside but on the inside I mean it's these videos that have been flooding LinkedIn for a little while of a completely immersive viewing experience with unique camera angles so the same patch of land has these three venues and a couple of Starbucks and they are all absolutely incredible in their own way and I was lucky enough to go to all three of them when I was out there Cosm yeah amazing slightly sick making if you are that close to the screen and there are some unfamiliar camera angles.

8:17But an amazing and unique experience. Very American in terms of how it's monetized. I can't quite get my head around how they might scale into different geographies just because everything is very expensive there. The ticket price to get in is huge. And then it's big F &B charges. Although I noticed that Cosm's top brass are... They're coming to London. coming to London to, and they've been quite public about this, to check out some potential venues and talk to some potential partners for a bit of a, you know, there seems to be a mood for some sort of international expansion. Yeah. And which is to be expected.

8:54Absolutely. And it is amazing. But I, yeah, I wonder about the business model because they will have to buy rights in a different way to other kind of bars and clubs because they're completely unique camera angles. Yeah, SoFi, gigantic and an amazing experience built into the ground so you enter and then it goes underneath it goes down for a significant way and much more impressive when you go in than when you're in the vast car park outside it's one of these sports stadiums i've never known another one like it really where you go in and it's almost impossible to know where you are like to locate yourself in the venue what level there are multiple levels within the tiers of the stadium there are lots of different areas all sorts of different hospitality areas that you have to sort of bob and weave your way through um to get to where you're going yeah the scale the scale of it is absolutely enormous and incredible uh to behold and then you've got intuit dome uh which is a pioneering venue two billion dollars was spent on designing and building it uh it is unashamedly kind of tech first but not tech for tech's sake um they say and uh sort of pioneering in its use of technology um notably the gigantic halo video screen that goes the full circumference of the roof in the venue uh and is double-sided um so you can see the bit that's facing you and the furthest bit that's facing the inside of the halo 18 000 seats near enough all fully powered each seat has a power supply which is unique in sports which not only means that you can charge your phone it also means that they can do jazzy things to accentuate key moments of any particular experience lights etc and also lots of gamification opportunities um it's got this incredible sort of bank of standing the standing area um that they again unashamedly ripped from various football stadiums particularly um Dortmund it's a completely different experience that they're watching the fans in the standing area at the Clippers versus watching the fans at standing area of the football it's all a bit sort of uh two four six eight who do we appreciate kind of you know flick your heels rather than rather than sort of intimidating atmosphere i can imagine you joined in there of course yeah yeah yeah and yeah every it feels the experience of it feels modern there are some teething issues with the tech of course and actually gillian um tells a story about opening night earlier this uh basketball season well it opened in august 2024 and steve bolmer who's obviously been in tech all his life former microsoft guy etc he said the one thing you can guarantee is that the tech will fail and lo and behold on opening night something did go wrong they had to reboot reboot the whole system but they've got all of this someone has to go first with this tech it's a lot of facial recognition technology walkout technology you don't have to touch your phone or use your wallet etc etc and even from my experience going to one game there yeah there are definitely sort of gremlins in the system but they're always going to be i guess and you know there will be iterations of this stuff amazing hospitality areas they've got um they've copied a lot of or um adopted a lot of the things that are working really well in american football they've got these lounges that the players walk through um to go in and out of the changing room during the game they've got another full-size basketball court sort of hidden somewhere else in the arena where they have sort of local schools tournaments etc or Steve Ballmer can come in and practice whenever he wants to the Clippers practice facility is sort of embedded into the facility itself as well all very impressive yeah a beautiful venue clearly no expense spared uh and the whole point of it is sort of using tech to try and give people the absolute best experience that they can get at a live sports or music or whatever event and i would say that they're going some way to getting there and it's sort of with a view on the bigger picture and thinking about the run-up to la LA28 and the Olympic Games.

13:30The Inglewood Basketball Arena. Well, they're going to strip off the sponsor names as best they can, the IOC, but inevitably Intuit Dome will be used for the basketball, Dodger Stadium will be used for the baseball, SoFi Stadium will be utilised, and this could be the sort of sleeper hit of the LA Games, I think. It's going to be turned into this 38 ,000 seat swimming pool for the aquatics events, which could be really spectacular. And the opportunity, not only for the IOC in terms of utilising some of this technology, they've made very great play, the LA organisers, Casey Wasserman down, that they didn't want to build any permanent new venues for this Olympic Games, but they've got such an array of brand new technologically cutting edge venues and also very established older venues with great tradition and history like the Coliseum, which will host once again, I think for the third time, the athletics at the Games.

14:37You also look at it from the point of view talking about the hospitality options in something like the basketball, which is always a big hit in the US at any Olympic Games, the opportunity for an on-location as they look to build the programmes and sell some really novel, compelling packages and put those together over the coming years. I think you start to get a sense of what the IOC is seeing in LA. And in fact, over the last few days, we've seen a few more venues confirmed and a couple that jumped out, inevitably like we saw in Paris and like we've seen at most recent games, trying to use as much of the city as possible.

15:14and Venice Beach will be the venue for the triathlon events. Universal Studios is going to be used and will be an interesting, I think, location for Squash's Olympic debut and lots more downtown venues being utilised as well. Three separate clusters, one of which will be the one that you mentioned to really utilise the big new venues. But clearly it's going to be a very different games in a lot of ways to what we saw in Paris. Very different type of city, but my goodness, they've got plenty of facilities to call upon. They are making it. So I haven't been to LA for a few years. And I definitely noted a big effort has been made in terms of the transport infrastructure there.

15:59That was always the thing that I thought, well, that was going to be a nightmare. LA above any city in the world is a car city. They in fact - Above any city in the world? I would say so. I've just been to Bangalore. yeah they've got bikes yeah yeah yeah true true anyway yes point your point holds yeah i mean they've got this they now have um a kind of monorail slash uh train thing that connects downtown with santa monica um which is very um visible i'm not sure how much is used yet um but But I think that is the first step. I mean, I think more is maybe planned. And they've got this sort of driverless car technology, which I don't know whether that is reducing the number of cars on the road, but it's extraordinary stuff.

16:48It's interesting. I was reading just you mentioned Santa Monica, the LA, the LA Olympic organizers actually failed to reach agreement with Santa Monica. That was going to be that that was the first plan for the triathlon, for the beach volleyball. But they failed to reach agreement. I mean, I think that's going to be one of the events that is actually in Long Beach now, which is not too far away. It's all the same beach. It's all the same. It's all the same beach. It's one big beach. Different jurisdictions. There's a lot of politics at play as ever. Yeah. Yeah. Shall we go on with this interview with Gillian Zucker?

17:17I'm looking forward to hearing it. Okay. Here is me chatting with Gillian Zucker in her office in Intuit Dome a few weeks ago. Gillian Zucker, thank you very much for having me here to your amazing home. Can you, first of all, set the scene for us, maybe going sort of micro first, tell us exactly where we are now and what we can see and then expand a little bit further. Well, we are at Intuit Dome, which is our version of what we think is the best experience possible for people who are coming to attend live events basketball games. And we scoured the worlds, literally, for everything about facilities that makes them amazing.

18:01And we brought all those ideas back to a table full of really smart people and talked about how we might be able to bring it back to Los Angeles and put it all in one place. And that is Intuit Dome. So welcome. Thank you very much. Yes. Time Magazine's world's greatest World's Greatest Places 2025. It's in it. Yes. Right here. We're sitting in one of them right now. We're so honored. How many greatest places did they have? I think they had 40. Okay. So you're one of 40. That's all right. Yes. Pretty extraordinary. If you think about the whole world, this is one of them. Was it buildings or literally it could be anywhere?

18:35No, it's anything. Yeah. It's all sorts of things, which I think was extraordinary. What's your favorite kind of gong that you've got so far? Like any kind of arena that gets built. obviously you want to get celebrated, but this truly is an amazing, and we'll talk about it, but it's a spellbinding arena and you've spent a lot of money on it. So, you know, you need to get some credit, but so far, what's your favorite kind of award or recognition that you've got? That one was pretty good. I think we're pretty happy about Fast Company, most innovative places. That's pretty exciting, or most innovative companies, because so much of what we did required a lot of risk-taking and trying things that were new and introducing them to a fan base that had never experienced these things before and seeing how people have responded to them and how it's really transformed the event of experience.

19:24I mean, we're hopeful that people can take those innovations and that they'll spread throughout the world. And it's our way of giving back to everybody who gave so much to us to help us build the place. So you opened in August, is that right? Yes, we opened August 15th with Bruno Mars. Yeah. Pretty, pretty amazing day. We had all of our Clippers players who came and we had, you know, so many people from the community. And of course, we had so many people from the basketball and sports industries who came out to be a part of it. It was pretty extraordinary. What were your sort of feelings then, you know, having overseen the project?

20:03I can't imagine a project like this is all positivity and plain sailing. So when you get to the kind of crystallization of it, I guess it's nerves, it's grinning through a lot of challenges. Like, yeah, can you describe your emotions? Well, I think very, I mean, the emotions were overwhelming and in so many ways, like a sense of enormous pride, but also like a trepidation. How are people going to respond to this building? And I do remember that just before we cut the ribbon that Steve had mentioned something about his longevity and the tech industry. And one of the things that he knows is that the tech's going to break.

20:44He's pretty sure of that. And sure enough, a few minutes later, as we went to go open the gates, we had interference on our systems that were supposed to process everybody entering the gates. And we had about 20, 25 minutes where we had to sort of pause. Reboot. Exactly. And get the system back up. But once we did get it up, it worked perfectly. But I would say those were 25 of the longest minutes of my life. Who were you small talking with at that? You know, sort of. But, you know, what I tell everyone about that was like, that was really the moment that I was most proud of, of everything on that opening day.

21:23It was the way that everybody just bonded together. Nobody pointed fingers. Nobody raised their voices. Nobody said anything except how can I help? And we're throwing out ideas about, you know, how to bring it back up quickly and get the experience going for the people who came to see Bruno Mars. And that's exactly where we landed. So great day. So how long was the build process then? So really about seven years, like the actual construction piece of it was 30 months. But going through the whole design process. And one of the things that we really tried to do was understand the building. So we wanted to be at 100 % construction drawings.

21:59You're really never quite at that. But that was really where we wanted to be so that when we started the process, we would have a really firm grasp on the budget. Yeah. Because I'm sort of interested in whether you know how many interviews you've done about this building. I have no idea. I mean, definitely hundreds, probably approaching thousands. Right. So that being the case, I wondered whether you could rattle off right now a few facts and figures about this place. Obviously, the big headline one. You're putting me on the spot. I'm putting you on the spot and I appreciate I'm putting you on the spot.

22:31But it's just the top line ones that you can remember. I'm not going to ask any specific kind of areas. $2 billion is a big headline figure that everyone prints for how much it costs to build this place, which is one of, if not the most expensive stadiums anywhere in the world, let alone basketball arenas. What else have we got in here? Give us some facts and figures. What other facts and figures? Well, it's just under 18 ,000 seats. I think we really wanted to have something that felt like you were close to the action, whether that was the court or the stage that everybody felt like they were literally right there.

23:05And a lot of the construction design of the building was with that in mind. How do we take the terrace level seats and make them feel like they're premium? And how do you create that environment? So, you know, an interesting thing that we did is we made the building top loading. So if you're on the terrace level, and you're walking along the concourse, even if you're sitting in the very last row of the building, you're walking down toward what you came to see. So does that mean you built it underground, basically? No, because you're actually coming in on the main level, then you're going up an escalator.

23:36But we built a concourse that's top loading so that you're loading down. So if you're in the lower bowl, you would come in on the main level and you would do the same thing. You would go down toward what you came to see. So that was a big part of the goal of the facility. the interesting thing we learned about concessions because there there is a lot of differentiation between concessions and various different buildings and oftentimes it's the same provider so we started asking a bunch of questions about why why does the quality different between two buildings run by the same group yeah and what we learned was a lot of it has to do with functionality where your kitchen's located has an enormous impact on the quality of the food and so if you have to transport things from a single kitchen to a variety of different places that impacts it so we built 31 kitchens so every single concession stand actually has a kitchen in it where the food is cooked same with clubs their cooking is done in the club so that it's fresh and provides the best experience for fans yeah um so a lot of things that were like that we ran power to every seat in the building yes um i think that was no small cost i'd imagine yeah we had a group coming through here from the Cleveland Browns today.

24:46And they said, if you had to pick one thing that we absolutely have to do, I said, you need to run power to your seats because it changes everything for fans. And the number of things that you can then do with that. So it was the obvious things. Everybody wants to be able to charge their phone at their seat. Well, we've got a charging port, so you can do that. But we're also able to add LED lighting to every single seat. And so that really transforms the experience in the building that when you're able to accent key moments with these LED lights is quite the experience. And then we went a step further and we added a game controller to every seat.

25:18So every seat has a way of interacting with our extraordinary Halo board, which I'll touch on in a minute. And then lastly, it provided us an opportunity to be able to allow fans to interact with the HVAC units. So there's actually a vent under every single seat and people can go onto the app and they can let us know if they're hot or cool and it'll adjust in their particular area. Very nice. And then lastly, the Halo board, I think, is worth mentioning. So it's 44 ,000 square feet of LED. So this is a full acre of scoreboard. To give some concept of what that looks like, a letter in there, like the smallest one we use is two feet tall.

25:58so this is a massive massive board and what's even cooler about it is it's completely 4k so the quality of it is quite unlike anything you've ever seen and there's never been built a two-sided halo board inside an arena before so the way that we've been able to utilize it to bring fans closer to the action has been a lot of fun yeah and it's worth saying that we are sitting here in the kind of corporate offices inside the arena and we're sitting in the office of the chief communications officer we are chris wallace and he did not give you any prompts there and you were able to uh recall some excellent facts and figures about it so well done um or should i say maybe you did give prompts i don't know chris uh i don't know how i don't know i don't know how that makes you sound telepathic yeah um you mentioned the wall so i actually um was lucky enough to have a tour of the arena with Chris yesterday.

26:53And a really, really striking aspect of it is this gigantic terrace, obviously coming from the UK, coming from Europe, it is very reminiscent of some iconic soccer events. Yeah, Dortmund. It's even called the wall, right? So the yellow wall in Dortmund. Exactly. Is that unique in basketball? Yes, it is. And tell us about this process of kind of cherry picking bits. Yeah. So we met with the folks from Dortmund and they were talking about it and we learned about the wall and kind of, and then of course we did a ton of research on it and found lots of other places that have similar type amenities, but theirs is, is, uh, it's pretty extraordinary.

27:33And we said we would love to have that kind of experience for fans. So it's steep. Right. And it's 51 rows high. So it starts in row one at a court side and goes all the way up to row 51, which is the last row. It's 4 ,500 seats. And in the middle of it is a standing supporters section of about 300 people. And that particular group we call the Swell. And they are the ones that really guide the entire arena. We call them sort of the heartbeat of the place. But they have chants and cheers. And I think that they're different from what you might experience in European soccer, more like what you might see at a college NCAA game.

28:12So, you know, it's a cheering section, but it's a place where families can go, where kids can go, where somebody with a lot of energy to expend can go. And there's a real sense of community in there that's pretty special. You know, we were hearing stories about how these folks were having Thanksgiving dinner together, just because they were all sort of members of the same group that cheers on the Clippers every night. And what do you want, what's the sort of ideal experience for someone coming here now? What do you really want people to come away from a visit to Intuit Dome thinking and feeling?

28:46I think people come here for a lot of different reasons. There's people who come here who are hardcore basketball fans. There's people who come here who are a hardcore fan of a particular genre of music. There's people who come here who are coming because their significant other dragged them. There are people who are coming because, you know, they want to bond with a child who they're disconnecting with as they become a teenager, right? Everybody's got their reason for why they're actually coming to the facility. And we want two things to happen. One, when they get here, we want them to feel like we built this place for them.

29:17And if you look around at all of our different product offerings, there's kind of something for everyone, right? If you're there to entertain a corporate client, there's a certain place that would be the perfect environment for that. And if you're there with, you know, a seven-year-old who's experiencing their first basketball game ever, there's a place for you too. So I think that's the first thing that we wanted to make sure that we touched on. And I think the second is that you leave with an experience that was better than you expected. And we work really hard at that. And a lot of it has to do with the way that we train our hosts and to really be proactive and in looking for opportunities to just make people's day.

29:54Famously, there's a lot of facial recognition in this arena. There's walkout technology everywhere. I think the app is very detailed and comprehensive. With all of that technology, are you able to get better feedback from, are you able to learn more about what people experience and how they behave here? Yeah, I think it's more that we're able to personalize the experience for people. And, you know, that's something that like everybody enjoys. I mean, that's a big part of what technology has provided to all of us is you're not getting served ads or offers for things that you're not interested in.

30:33It's things that you are interested in. And that's exactly what we're attempting to do with the technology here. Our Game Face ID, it's all about making your experience seamless. It's so that you can treat this building like it's your living room. You walk in. No one has to stop you to take your ticket. You go into a concession stand. You pull a drink out of a refrigerator. You grab a burger from the person who's cooking it and you walk right out and you don't stop to pay. So you're not spending all of your time when you're at a facility in line waiting for things. You're in your seat and you're enjoying what you came to see, either the game or the concert.

31:09Although I hear that in the superstore, in the merchandise bits, if you pick something up and don't put it back where it's supposed to be, you could get charged for that. So it encourages tidy behavior as well. There are bins to put it back in. And we also have the ability to go back and check. So if somebody in any situation, if somebody feels like whatever they were charged for is not something they got, we're able to check that and make good on it. Good. Gillian, it strikes me that, and maybe I'm being presumptuous here, but it strikes me that sort of storytelling is something that's important to you or something that your organization at least has tapped into in quite an effective way.

31:55The last time that we had any kind of formal interaction was when you guys, the Clippers, came over to London for leaders a good few years ago now. I guess it must have been 18, 17, 18 maybe. and you came over with the crew from Bumble who were your jersey patch sponsor at the time and you told this really effective story about female empowerment and you know equitable executive team here at the Clippers and I wonder about the storytelling kind of opportunities that you have now with the new arena and how you're managing to seed those into kind of partnership discussions, into ticket selling discussions?