Don't Forget Your Tickets

Kevin Dixon (interviewed by Alex Eagle) on the Evolution of Stadium Access Control Technology - A Live Special from Emirates Stadium in London

• Carl-Erik Michalsen Moberg • Season 6 • Episode 7

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How has stadium access control evolved from paper tickets to cutting-edge digital solutions?

In this episode of Don't Forget Your Tickets, recorded live at Emirates Stadium, Kevin Dixon (HID Global) takes us inside the world of venue security and fan experience, drawing from his work at FIFA World Cups, UEFA competitions, and major sporting events. He shares how the transition from barcodes to NFC technology has reduced queues, enhanced security, and improved fan experience.

Beyond technology, Kevin reflects on his own football career, adding a personal touch to the conversation. We also explore:

- The future of venue access – Can UHF and NFC ticketing create seamless, encrypted, non-transferable tickets?
- Balancing security & speed – How clubs can optimize access without compromising fan experience.
- The power of data – How innovative strategies like Brentford FC’s “yellow card” scheme are shaping stadium atmospheres.
- Facial recognition & cross-industry tech – Will these innovations redefine stadium entry?

Join us as we discuss the next phase of sports venue technology and how clubs can stay ahead of evolving fan expectations.

This Live Special episode of Don't Forget Your Tickets was recorded at the Don't Forget Your Tickets conference at Emirates Stadium, January 23rd 2025, as the sixth out of 12 on-stage interviews that day. Kevin Dixon was interviewed by Alex Eagle.

Don't Forget Your Tickets is powered by TicketCo and hosted by TicketCo’s CEO, Carl-Erik Michalsen Moberg. The podcast was originally named TicketingPodcast.com

Speaker 1:

Modern stadium access is about more than just scanning tickets. It's about security, efficiency and a seamless fan experience. At Don't Forget your Tickets at Emirates Stadium, alex Eagle our own Alex Eagle sat down with AgeID Global's Kevin Dixon to discuss how access control technology is evolving in football. With experience from major events like the FIFA World Cup and UEFA competitions, kevin shares insights on key challenges in stadium access today how technology is streamlining entry and reducing queues, and the role of accreditation, security and fraud prevention All super important topics From matchday operations to future proofing stadiums. This episode explores how clubs can elevate their access control strategies. Here is a new episode of Don't Forget your Tickets.

Speaker 2:

Enjoy Hi everyone, thank you for joining us for this conversation, which is around the art of access control. My name is Alex Eagle and I'm the sales development manager for Sport within the UK and Ireland for TikiCo, and I'm very lucky to have Kevin Dixon, sales manager for HID, alongside me.

Speaker 3:

Thanks, alex, great to be here. I'm not quite tall enough to sit on these chairs properly, but I'll let my legs dangle, yeah. So hi everyone. I'm Kevin Dixon from HID Global. I've been working for HID now for five years nearly six years and I've been in the access control market since 2007. A little bit about HID Global. I'm conscious for it not to be a sales pitch, but we are a very large, successful company based out in Austin, texas, and we provide secure identities across the world in over 100 countries. The business unit that I represent. We specialize in major events and stadium technology, so a reader on the turnstile, scanning people in that way, and we can go into all the different technologies we provide. But yeah, that's HID and the UK and Ireland is kind of the territory I look after.

Speaker 2:

Thank you, Kevin. What about your professional sporting career, though? Do you want to?

Speaker 3:

tell us about that. In my bio it says pro footballer. So I have to do a disclaimer here, guys, and say I don't talk about it very often because it's not a career worth talking about. I signed professional football with Newcastle United when I was 17. And about three years later I was redundant. So not really a career that you'd shout about. But yeah, there you go. I left home at 16 and played football for a couple of years.

Speaker 2:

You were signed by Bobby Robson, though, correct? Yeah?

Speaker 3:

yeah, yeah, brute Hull. Bobby Robson, though, correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah, ruud Gullit, bobby Robson, kenny Daglish A big shout out to Derry City here in the crowd. I also signed for Derry 20 years ago, played for three months. That was really good times, good fun. I played against Barcelona in a friendly match. I like that one, yeah. So anyway, yeah, the football career, we'll call that one short.

Speaker 2:

Perfect. Well, Kev, let's jump into the topic of conversation. I want to firstly touch on market trends in the access control space, of where it's been in the past, where it's been right now and where it's going. Let's start with when you were selling at crowds at St James' Park Stub tickets, that type of approach?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, really good question, I mean. What I will say is the speed of change of technology is so fast nowadays. Back I joined in the industry in 2007, there was probably three or four Premier League clubs that had access control. It was a real nice to have. Whereas you fast forward now to 2025, it's almost a prerequisite.

Speaker 3:

You wouldn't dream of putting on a big major event not having access control or not having a reading device to scan that ticket. So it's an absolute must have for security, for data. But you know, going back to the past, you'd have a head unit scanning a 1D barcode, I think. That journey then moved to a physical card with a chip inside and then you use, you know, contactless technology. Then we said, okay, how do we create better convenience for the fan? So you want to be sat on the sofa at home, let's buy a ticket, let's have a ticket downloaded to the phone. So that was a big, massive sea change. And now that digital ticket is in the format of like an NFC ticket, so I don't know if you know a near field communication like a bank card. You tap your ticket, your mobile phone on the side of the head unit and you know getting access into the stadium or event is much, much quicker. So, yeah, a lot of change.

Speaker 3:

What has prompted that change? Do you think speed, security, customer experience they don't necessarily go hand in hand. You know venues and and stadiums want better security. But better security means longer queues, searching people, giving you data, signing up to things. That's quite difficult, whereas a good customer experience is that they see me and say, hey, kevin, you come. You know you don't have to be checked at all. So that's the challenge. But I would say, yeah, security from the venues and the data as well. Data is absolutely key knowing who's coming in, where and when.

Speaker 2:

So I'll come back to data in a second then. But you mentioned speed of change. So with that in mind, 10 years in 2035, then where do you think access control is going to be?

Speaker 3:

I haven't got a crystal ball, but I would say definitely, technology just keeps evolving so quickly. We're seeing a big trend. I mean we're very proud that we worked at the Football World Cup in Qatar in 2022. So we were across eight stadiums. It was a massive project a bit last minute, but we had to take multiple data sources in.

Speaker 3:

And when we look at trends, we're seeing frictionless entry a big thing. So people don't want to necessarily go into a metal turnstile or hand the bag over to be searched and checked and then go into the turnstile and wait to see if the ticket's accepted, then push the way through a turnstile. We see things like uhf technology, so that's ultra high frequency technology, so almost like a chip inside or a wearable device that when I approach that event, maybe five meters away, the reader can pick up and emit the frequency. So we can see kevin's coming in from five meters away. They've got my image, they can see, you know, maybe, my dietary requirements, where I need to be sitting. So yeah, that's a big one.

Speaker 3:

Frictionless scanning and obviously digitalization is already underway. I mean, when we look a couple of years ago, I think there's only one or two premier league teams using this nfc ticketing, whereas now it's like I'm having conversations with league two and non-league clubs saying I want my ticket on the phone, but I don't want it in the form of a qr code. I want it encrypted, I want it secure because of all the benefits of that. With nfc ticketing you tap it onto the reader and you go through so much quicker. You can't screenshot it, you can't send it on that way, you can't WhatsApp it to your mate. So it is much faster, more secure.

Speaker 2:

I want to move the conversation on slightly. Then. You mentioned something earlier on around data and obviously, as we know, data is king.

Speaker 3:

But what I'd like to find out is how access controls companies companies such as hid global can help with that with the clubs yeah, not harping on about the past, but people probably put access control in 10 years or for security and for fraud, to check people are on the correct ticket and so you're not coming in under an eight pound ticket, you're paying the full price of 50 pound. I'd almost flip it on its head and say people put in access control now for data and all the good things, but you know little things like if you can look at the stadium map and you see that the home end in the corner blocks two and three are already filled up, you can get onto the stadium manager and say, okay, redeploy those stewards to a different area. So operationally, you've got that data to make further decisions and cost savings as well. Have you got?

Speaker 3:

any examples in the marketplace of a club or a sport that does this well, yeah, we were with Brentford Football Club, and the G-Tech Stadium is known for a great atmosphere really well known for a good atmosphere and they adopted a thing called the yellow card scheme. So if we're season ticket holders, obviously if we didn't turn up to the game, we'd be given a notice to say Kev, we didn't see you at the game. You know you could have sold your ticket back to the football club. So you resell your ticket back to the football club for 20 pounds and they resell it for, I don't know, 40. So there's a bit of a commercial angle for Brentford, but driver was creating a better atmosphere for the fans and the players in the stadium and it's really worked.

Speaker 3:

So if me and you don't turn up, the ticket office team there can literally pull a report from our system in real time, not after the event. It's super quick and we can send an email and we can generate that report to say kevin and alex are the season two goalers that haven't turned up, and if you don't come to three in a row, you kind of get a yellow card. It's interesting, isn't it? They're not going to ban anyone, are they? But it's a way to incentivise them to say, listen, you bought a ticket. Sell your ticket back.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely Obviously. We've known each other for a while now. One time you mentioned to me about InnerZone as well. Do you maybe elaborate a little bit more on that?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, we've got our friends here from Surrey Cricket, the Keir Oval. It's a great venue. They make this member-owned as well. So we have the technology.

Speaker 3:

In the past you'd integrate with a ticketing system and if this one ticket allows that one access, what we do the membership, be it digital or physical, can be scanned on the outer perimeter at the Hobbs Gate and then from there you can. Also the member can be scanned again via a handheld or a fixed device at the members lounge and then you can even go a third time. You can go to the boardroom and you get scanned a third time. So we can take the data from the ticking system and we can put multi layers of access within our access control software. And that's gone down really, really well. The members love the fact that in the past they just use scanning once and then they go wherever they like. But the members, I think, like to be acknowledged that they're only allowed in the members area. From a status point of view, maybe, but is that again data? You know, using the technology in the right way to create a good customer experience.

Speaker 2:

I want to move on to something again that you touched on earlier, a bit of conversation around innovation and flexibility. You mentioned some of the future trends that you think are coming up. I'm keen to know, though, how important an access control company needs to be in terms of flexibility and working with the clubs for all of that.

Speaker 3:

For me it's absolutely key because you know we're not going to sit on stage and say we're absolutely perfect, we've never made a mistake. Anyone that says that is telling lies. But it's how you react. It's how you work with the client in a live environment and these big major events, and it's how you react and solve their problem.

Speaker 3:

We worked with some major events with UEFA, a long-term client of ours, and also in Qatar, where we was taking in the feed for the ticket, we was taking in the feed for the fan ID and then also the accreditation. So our reading device had to go to three multiple data sources in real time and pull it, and sometimes things can go wrong and it's how quick can you upload that file and can you get around it a different way. So, yeah, flexibility and even from you know long standing clients if people change ticketing or if people change the repost platform. Maybe in the past, if I'm being honest, suppliers out there would say, oh no, we don't work with supplier A, we only work with supplier B. You can't get away with that anymore. You know every platform has an API. It's an API integration. You scope the work, you do the work quickly and you make it happen. So flexibility and working with the client is absolutely key. It's probably the biggest thing for me.

Speaker 2:

Who essentially drives this change and innovation? Is it the clubs? Is it the fans? Is it yourselves, for example, or is it a mixture of all of them? Put? Together it's probably a mixture, and then mainly the fan, because Is that because of the customer journey and the customer experience essentially?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's a really good point. How do you become easy to buy from? How do you get into that event or that stadium easily? It's all about the fan and if you get loads of complaints as a stadium on the Monday morning because they had to join a queue and they had to wait ages to get their thermal printer from the box office, then that drives digital ticketing. So they will drive it by complaining or expecting more. You know we was kind of getting our boarding passes to travel abroad on your mobile phone before it kind of got really boarding passes to travel abroad on your mobile phone before it kind of got really adopted into football and sport. So I'd say fans are driving that demanding, more, demanding, easier ways to get into the stadium, from an access control point of view anyway then you mentioned, then obviously can you also take inspiration outside of the sporting environment as well.

Speaker 2:

You mentioned about going through the airport as well. Is it able to bring other technologies or other experiences into the sporting?

Speaker 3:

world as well, absolutely, absolutely. I'm really fortunate that HIV Global, a very large company, and many different business areas. If I'm being honest, I don't understand every single business area, but we have facial recognition businesses. We have tags that they put in animals' ears that they track from birth to selling at the end. So, yeah, facial recognition in airports and applications around the world. They're being used right now and I think they're out there. But it's like, um, you know how quickly will they be introduced into the stadium events kind of space, because there's still a stigma, isn't there around giving your face to access a stadium. But but it will come. It's just how quickly it will come. It's like we talked about digital ticketing For years. Everyone said, oh, getting into the stadium on your phone is revolutionary and you know it's definitely coming, but it took a long time.

Speaker 2:

To finish, I think the most important question I'd like to ask you today is who was the best player you played with and the best player you played against?

Speaker 3:

Best player with on the training field probably Alan Shearer, and the best player against was Ronaldinho when he played Derry City. Tell us the story. It's a really embarrassing story, hence why I was only at Derry City for three months. I come on in the second half, tried to take a player on in our own half, give the ball away. They went down the other end and scored the goal straight away, and I could hear the crowd like who's this guy? So yeah, not good in the slightest. And then I was worried about what shirt I could get after the game because there was patrick cliver, saviola ronaldinho. I was thinking where am I going to get the shirt?

Speaker 2:

so yeah, not something to shout about anyway, guys do you think Ronaldinho's sitting down somewhere saying Kevin Dixon's the best player I've played against?

Speaker 3:

not a million years, absolutely not, no perfect.

Speaker 2:

Well, kevin, thank you so much for your insights today. Really appreciate it. Have a warm round of applause for Kevin Dixon. Please cheers guys. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

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Carl-Erik Michalsen Moberg

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