January 2007: For football fans, the start of a new season brings new hope, new expectations and new anticipation. At English Premiership club Manchester City, the start of the 2006/7 season also brought a new ticketing experience using cell phones equipped with Near Field Communication (NFC) technology.
Manchester City has some 30,000 season ticket holders. 100 of these have been selected to take part in the first NFC trial of its kind in the United Kingdom. Using NFC-enabled cell phones, they can gain access to the ground and pay for food, drink and merchandising – just by holding their phone against a contactless reader.
The club’s home ground, the City of Manchester Stadium, is already equipped with a fully functioning MIFARE infrastructure. And all tickets for matches at the stadium have MIFARE ICs embedded. So the switch to NFC and the greater benefits it offers fans is particularly easy. The infrastructure was delivered by system integrator Fortress, with Intelligent Venue Systems supplying the application software.
Thanks to the existing MIFARE infrastructure, if the trial is successful it could be easily rolled out to all 30,000 season ticket holders. In addition, the club has over 150,000 fan club members whose current MIFARE-based membership cards could be replaced by NFC-enabled phones.
Five other English Premiership clubs (Arsenal, Liverpool, Reading, West Ham and Wigan) also have MIFARE infrastructures installed at their grounds. These forward thinking clubs are now looking at ways in which they can cooperate to offer fans even better service. For example, when Manchester City next travels to Arsenal, the two clubs are planning a trial that will allow the away fans to use their NFC-enabled phones to access Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium.
Soon, football fans all across the UK could be getting into games or buying their half-time pies just by waving their phones.
The City of Manchester Stadium
The City of Manchester Stadium, also known as Eastlands, was originally built for the 2002 Commonwealth Games. It was opened on July 25 of that year and seated 38,000 people for the athletics events at the games. In 2003, the stadium was converted into an all-seater football venue and became home to English Premiership club Manchester City F.C. It currently has a capacity of 47,726 for football matches.
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