LAFC & BMO Stadium: Fan Experience Analysis
Los Angeles Football Club · Interview Project · Spring 2026
Python Tableau NLP / Sentiment Analysis Business Strategy Fan Revenue
9,246
Fan survey responses analyzed
5 yrs
2021–2025 post-pandemic period
92.8%
Feedback completion rate

Project Context: As part of the interview process for the Analyst, Business & Data Strategy role at LAFC, I was given a dataset of fan survey responses collected at BMO Stadium from 2021 to 2025 and asked to present a hypothetical business plan to the club's President covering the next five years (2026–2030). The task was to analyze what fans feel about their experience, identify the most important operational and revenue opportunities, and walk through my thinking as if I owned the execution of the plan end-to-end.

Business Question: What do five years of fan feedback tell us about where LAFC and BMO Stadium should focus to grow revenue and improve the fan experience from 2026 to 2030?

Dataset Overview
Source Fan survey responses collected by LAFC at BMO Stadium events, provided as part of this interview project. Each row represents one completed survey submission.
Date Range July 2021 through March 2026. Analysis of trends and year-over-year comparisons covers 2021–2025 only; 2026 is excluded from multi-year charts as a partial year.
Total Responses 9,246 survey responses across all events and years. Survey volume peaked in 2022 (n=3,085) and was lowest in 2024 (n=858); the reason for this variation is unknown from the dataset alone.
Events Covered LAFC matches, ACFC (Angel City FC) matches, and concerts at BMO Stadium. The dataset had no explicit event type field; event type was inferred for each survey batch using keyword classification on the open-ended feedback responses.
Fields Six columns: survey date, response date, seating location (5 tiers), total spend, account registration status (YES / NO / null), and an open-ended feedback field.
Feedback Response Rate 92.8% of responses contained meaningful text in the feedback field. The remaining 7.2% were blank, near-blank ("no", "n/a", "none"), or otherwise non-substantive and were excluded from sentiment and theme analysis.
Spend Data Availability Spend was recorded for 71.4% of all responses overall, but coverage varied significantly by event type: 96.6% for concerts, 35.7% for LAFC matches, and 0% for ACFC matches. Cross-event spend comparisons are not reliable as a result.
Seating Tiers Five categories in the data: General, Floor/Pit, Premium, VIP Floor/Pit, and Supporters Section. General and Floor/Pit together account for over 80% of all captured revenue.
Interactive Dashboard

Use the navigation buttons at the top of the dashboard to move between the Sentiment, Pain Points, and Fan Value pages.

Why the Next Five Years Are Different

LAFC enters 2026 with a loyal, sold-out fanbase and the most favorable external environment in the club's history. Two once-in-a-generation events are converging in LAFC's backyard within a three-year window, and BMO Stadium sits at the geographic center of both.

$594M
World Cup 2026 LA economic impact
180K
Out-of-town visitors to LA County
$13.6B+
LA28 Olympics regional impact
15M+
Olympic visitors to greater LA
FIFA World Cup 2026
Los Angeles is hosting 8 World Cup matches this summer, with SoFi Stadium sitting 1.2 miles from BMO.
The US Men's opening match against Paraguay kicks off on June 12. The average World Cup visitor to LA is projected to spend $2,350 per trip, with hotel prices rising up to 90% during the tournament window. Of the 180,000 incremental visitors to LA County, 60% will be first-time visitors to the United States, a global audience seeing LAFC's city for the first time.
LA28 Olympics 2028
The 2028 Olympics Opening Ceremony will be held at LA Memorial Coliseum, directly adjacent to BMO Stadium.
37 of 41 Olympic venues are inside LA County, and the Games run July 14–30. The Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) projects a $13.6–17.6B regional economic impact, with pre-Games spending already accumulating from 2024 onward. Infrastructure investment in the Exposition Park corridor will improve transit and pedestrian access surrounding BMO directly.
Fan Spending Power: FRED Data
LAFC fan spend grew 114% even as recreation costs outpaced income by nearly 10 points.
Federal Reserve (FRED) data shows recreation costs rose 12.7 index points since 2021 while real disposable income per capita grew just 1.5 index points over the same period. By 2025, real disposable income had recovered above the 2021 baseline, and LA entertainment sector employment reached a record 159,800 workers, 6.4% above pre-COVID levels. The spending environment heading into 2026 is stronger than at any point during the period this dataset covers.
LA Demographics & MLS Growth
LAFC operates in the largest Hispanic/Latino market in the country, and it is still growing.
LA County is 48.6% Hispanic/Latino, with 4.7 million residents, and Hispanic/Latino fans make up approximately 30% of the MLS national fanbase. 2024 was a record MLS season with 11.9 million total attendees and a $250M/year Apple TV deal raising the league's national profile. LAFC, valued at over $1.2B, is participating in a league-wide growth moment that the World Cup will amplify further.
The Bottom Line
LAFC sells out BMO Stadium at ~99% capacity every home match. Volume growth is not an option.
Every future dollar of revenue must come from per-fan spend, premium upsell, and non-LAFC event revenue. The 2026–2028 window brings the highest-spending, most globally engaged audience the club has ever had access to. The four recommendations that follow are built around being ready before that window opens. Source: BMO Stadium capacity 22,000; LAFC 2025 average attendance 22,138 — Sports Illustrated, May 2025.
External Sources
What the Data Shows
  • Three operational pain points have persisted across all five years. Parking & Transit, Entry & Operations, and Food & Beverage are the top three most-mentioned feedback themes in every year from 2021 to 2025. Five years of the same three themes at the top of the distribution suggests they have not been meaningfully addressed.
  • Fans love the product. The frustration is operational. Atmosphere & Experience is the most positive theme at 60% positive sentiment, reflecting genuine enthusiasm for the club and stadium environment. Overall, 39% of all feedback was positive and only 19% was negative. The gap between fans' emotional connection to LAFC and their frustration with logistics is the clearest finding in the data.
  • Concert fans report higher negative sentiment rates than LAFC match fans across every year in the dataset. Concert attendees averaged a 23–25% negative rate versus 18–22% for LAFC matches, with both event types showing improvement since the 2024 peak. This is counterintuitive given that concerts have dramatically better spend capture (96.6% vs. 35.7%), and suggests the operational pain points at BMO are not limited to match-day experience.
  • Average fan spend grew from $206 in 2021 to $441 in 2025, a 114% increase. Among fans who reported spend data, the share of high spenders ($650+) grew from 14% in 2021 to 53% in 2025, while low spenders (under $175) dropped from 48% to 17%. These figures should be interpreted with caution: spend capture varied significantly by event type (35.7% for LAFC matches, 96.6% for concerts), and fans who spend more may be more inclined to report it, which could inflate the high-spender share.
  • Revenue is concentrated in two seating tiers. Floor/Pit (41.9%) and General (39.3%) together account for over 80% of all captured revenue. VIP Floor/Pit fans have the highest average spend at $573 but represent only 1.6% of total revenue due to their small share of total attendees. The per-fan revenue opportunity is in converting mid-tier spenders into premium buyers.
  • High-value fan share grew from 8.6% to 42.0% between 2021 and 2025, defined as the top quartile of spenders (above $399 per visit). A fanbase where 42% of surveyed attendees clear that threshold represents a materially different revenue profile than it did four years ago.
  • Critical data gaps limit financial visibility. ACFC match surveys collected zero spend data. LAFC match spend capture was 35.7% versus 96.6% for concerts. The account registration field used as a loyalty proxy had a 75.8% null rate. Without standardized data collection across all event types, any future revenue modeling rests on an incomplete picture.
High Priority: Operations
Fix the Three Persistent Pain Points Before 2026 World Cup Traffic Arrives
Parking & Transit, Entry & Operations, and Food & Beverage have appeared at the top of the feedback distribution every year for five years, and some of this reflects real LA infrastructure constraints that operations alone cannot fully solve. That said, comparable LA venues have found ways to meaningfully reduce friction. The Dodgers run a free game-day shuttle from Union Station, the LA Galaxy operate the Galaxy Express from two Metro stations, and Intuit Dome launched a free electric shuttle with app-integrated booking across a 6-mile service radius. A BMO-specific shuttle connecting the Expo Park/USC Metro station two blocks away to the stadium gates is a low-cost, high-visibility improvement that directly targets the top complaint in the dataset. With FIFA World Cup 2026 bringing a global audience to the neighborhood, the urgency to show measurable progress on all three themes by summer 2026 has never been higher.
High Priority: Revenue
Build a Tiered Premium Loyalty Program Anchored to the $400+ Spender Segment
The share of fans spending $400 or more per visit grew from 9% to 42% between 2021 and 2025. A structured loyalty program that tracks spend across visits, rewards premium behavior, and creates visible pathways from General seating into Floor/Pit and Premium tiers would both capture more per-visit revenue and improve retention among the fans already driving the majority of spend. The program does not need to be complex at launch. A spend-based tier structure with exclusive access benefits such as early entry, dedicated F&B, and member pricing is a proven format that aligns directly with what this fan data suggests they value.
High Priority: Revenue
Convert Low Spenders into Mid Spenders Through Accessible In-Stadium Incentives
While much of the spend growth story is about the rise of high spenders, 17% of fans in 2025 still fell in the low tier (under $175), and General seating drives 39.3% of all captured revenue. There is a large, addressable volume of fans who are not currently being nudged upward. Practical levers include F&B bundles available at entry that make a drink and food combination accessible at a modest price point, mobile ordering prompts during the match that surface affordable add-ons, and a visible entry-level spend threshold in any future loyalty program that gives low spenders a concrete reason to spend slightly more. The goal is not to turn every general admission fan into a premium buyer, but to move the floor of the spend distribution upward across the largest audience segment in the stadium.
High Priority: Strategy
Treat FIFA 2026 and LA28 as a Fan Acquisition Window, Not Just an Event
The 180,000 World Cup visitors projected for LA represent a one-time opportunity to expose a global audience to BMO Stadium at a moment when international soccer interest in the city will be at its peak. The goal is not just to host these visitors well. It is to convert them into long-term LAFC fans and ticket holders. That requires intentional CRM infrastructure: capturing contact information at matches, building targeted post-event communication flows, and creating World Cup-specific offers that connect the FIFA experience to a 2026–2027 LAFC season ticket. LA28, three years later, extends this window further.
Medium Priority: Fan Experience
Expand F&B Mobile Ordering Coverage and Optimize for Incremental Spend
Food & Beverage is the most-mentioned feedback theme by volume (2,021 mentions) and carries a 19.7% negative sentiment rate. The complaints center on wait times and line length rather than quality, which points to a throughput and awareness problem rather than a product one. To the extent that mobile ordering is already available at BMO, the opportunity is in expanding coverage to sections where it is underutilized, improving discoverability within the app, and designing upsell prompts that surface affordable add-ons during the match. Fans who skip concessions entirely due to line aversion represent incremental spend that better tooling could capture without requiring any operational overhaul.
Lower Priority: Long-Term
Invest in Survey Redesign to Enable Longitudinal Fan Value Tracking
The current survey instrument was not designed for longitudinal analysis. Event type had to be inferred via keyword matching. Loyalty status was inconsistently collected. Spend data was missing for entire event categories. As LAFC moves into a five-year growth period anchored by two major international events, the ability to track fan value over time, including visit frequency, spend per visit, sentiment trajectory, and churn signals, will become increasingly important. A redesigned survey with standardized fields, consistent question inclusion across event types, and a unique fan identifier would dramatically improve the quality of future analysis.
Step 1
Data Source & Scope
The dataset contains 9,246 fan survey responses collected at BMO Stadium events from July 2021 through March 2026, provided by LAFC for this project. Each row represents one survey response and includes survey date, response date, seating location, total spend, account registration status, and an open-ended feedback field. The dataset covers LAFC matches, ACFC matches, and concerts, though event type was not explicitly labeled in the data. Spend data was not collected for ACFC events, and LAFC match spend capture (35.7%) lagged well behind concerts (96.6%), which limits cross-event financial comparisons. 2026 is treated as a partial year and excluded from multi-year trend charts.
Step 2
Data Cleaning & Feature Engineering
Cleaning was done in Python (pandas). Key steps included parsing date fields and engineering time features (year, quarter, year-quarter), standardizing the spend field and building spend tier categories, flagging meaningful feedback versus empty or near-empty responses, and reclassifying the ambiguous "lafc member" column as "has_lafc_account" with a documented interpretation note. Event type was inferred via batch-level keyword majority vote, where each survey date was assigned the event type indicated by the plurality of keyword-matched responses.
Step 3
Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment scoring used TextBlob polarity on all open-ended feedback responses. Scores above 0.1 were labeled Positive, below -0.1 were labeled Negative, and the remainder Neutral. TextBlob is a lightweight NLP library appropriate for operational survey text of this length and style. Of 9,246 total responses, 92.8% contained meaningful feedback and received a sentiment score.
Step 4
Theme Categorization
Each feedback response was assigned to one or more of ten operational themes using keyword matching. Responses that matched no keywords were labeled General / Other, which accounted for approximately 23% of responses and was excluded from all theme visualizations as a non-actionable catch-all. Responses could match multiple themes, and the exploded theme-level dataset was used for all theme frequency and sentiment-by-theme analysis.
Step 5
Visualization in Tableau
The cleaned and enriched dataset was exported to Excel (two sheets: Main Data for spend and sentiment analysis, Theme Detail for theme-level analysis) and connected to Tableau Desktop. The dashboard spans three pages (Sentiment, Pain Points, and Fan Value) with clickable navigation buttons between views, published to Tableau Public as a packaged extract for embedding.
What I took away from this project
  • The most important analytical decision I made was not a technical one. It was choosing to document what the data could not tell us. The ACFC spend gap, the account field null rate, and the event type inference all had to be called out clearly rather than treated as minor footnotes. In a business context, overstating the reliability of a finding is more dangerous than acknowledging a gap.
  • Five years of the same complaints appearing at the top of the distribution is not a data story. It is an operational story. Parking, entry, and F&B are not new problems for venues. What the data shows is that they have not been resolved, which is a meaningful finding independent of the specific percentages. Framing it that way, rather than just reporting the numbers, is what makes analysis useful to a decision-maker.
  • The spend growth trend was the most interesting thing in the dataset, and I had to be careful not to overread it. A 114% increase in average spend could reflect genuine premiumization, a change in which events were surveyed, inflation, or some combination. I tried to be explicit about what the data could and could not confirm, while still drawing the directionally useful conclusion that the fan base was spending more and that this created a real opportunity.
  • Building the external context around the internal data findings was the part of this project that felt most like the actual role. FIFA 2026 and LA28 are not just color. They are the reason why fixing operational problems by a specific date matters enormously. Connecting those two layers is where the business plan comes together.
  • Event-level survey data behaves differently from transactional data. Survey batches can shift in composition over time, including which events were surveyed, which questions were asked, and how the form changed, and those compositional shifts can look like behavioral trends if you are not careful. Dealing with that carefully, without over-caveating every finding to the point of uselessness, was one of the harder parts of the analysis.
Tools and Skills
  • Python (pandas, TextBlob, matplotlib, seaborn): used for all data cleaning, feature engineering, sentiment scoring, theme classification, and chart generation. Outputs exported to Excel for Tableau ingestion.
  • Tableau Desktop: used to build all visualizations and the multi-page interactive dashboard with navigation buttons, published to Tableau Public for embedding.
  • NLP / Sentiment Analysis: applied TextBlob polarity scoring to 9,246 open-ended feedback responses; developed a 10-category keyword-based theme classifier to convert unstructured text into operational categories.
  • Business Strategy: recommendations grounded in both internal data findings and external context (FIFA World Cup 2026, LA28 Olympics), structured to address near-term operational gaps and longer-term revenue growth opportunities.
  • Data Quality Auditing: documented data limitations explicitly throughout the analysis, including spend capture gaps by event type, the ambiguous account registration field, and the inferred event type methodology.