Putting a Strategy in place….

Sport England aims to ensure positive planning for sport, enabling the right facilities to be provided in the right places, based on robust and up-to-date assessments of need for all levels of sport and all sectors of the community.

The Government’s National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) is clear about the role that sport plays in delivering sustainable communities through promoting health and well-being. Sport England, working with the provisions of the NPPF, wishes to see direct reference to sport in local planning policy to protect, enhance and provide sports facilities, as well as helping to realize the wider benefits that participation in sport can bring.

Does your authority need help to assess local need, consult with your key stakeholders, analyse the data and prepare a strategy. Insight in association with The Sports Consultancy can help you, because we have done it before for :-

Closure, refurbishment or re-build ? Swimming pool and leisure asset stock beyond repair? – For many local authorities’ facilities the clock has stopped ticking and a sticking-plaster is no longer the answer. If local government is to continue to be a provider of sports and leisure facilities something has to be done and soon. At Insight we can provide clear analysis on the options available and provide a feasibility study that will identify the facility your community needs, the capital costs, the funding options and the bottom line. No shocks, no surprises just insight that can help your Council to make informed decisions, keeping the pool doors open and the community active.

Stadia as part of integrated mixed-use urban fabric – Diversifying a sports business by leveraging the value of professional sports franchises has increased significantly over the past decade. This has been driven largely by new state-of-the-art stadia together with lucrative television rights from Europe. The appeal of cross-continent competition is irresistible. Football led, Rugby Union is following in its footsteps. Football teams continue to be bought by overseas investors, increasingly from China and the Far East with the vast television and branding rights as their goal. Owners are also finding ways to unlock the value of their team’s assets as the core of a wider sports and entertainment business at the heart of their urban communities.

Insight is working with its Partners on a number of mixed-use developments, where planned new Stadia are at the very heart of a mixed-use community development featuring hotels, restaurants, retail and commercial space and offices as well as social housing. These integrated developments give owners both the opportunity to capture fan spending before and after a game, as well as tap new revenue streams outside the traditional sports business, by maximizing asset usage in stadium down-time.

The viewing experience within a stadium environment has not fundamentally changed since the time of the ancient Greeks but technology and information technology is literally changing the playing field and providing an opportunity to create a new vision for both the experience of watching and playing sport but also for the role a stadium can play as a significant urban influencer.

The Stadium of Tomorrow will also be highly interactive, employing LED technology and AR to bridge the gap between the three participants in any sports event; the fan, the remote fan and the player. The improvement of the home-viewing experience has challenged sports teams to think about how they can better attract their audience to the stadium.

New ways that teams are improving the overall participation experience on stadium grounds is by partnering with already popular services, such as Amazon Prime. These partnerships appeal to the millennial generation, who are already well-versed with these types of services and are much more likely to participate in experiential spending. Capitalizing on the consumer habits of this generation is becoming increasingly important as they become the dominant force in the market.