Cisco Live Amsterdam - how Real Madrid soccer team shoots for the goal of the ultimate connected fan experience

In 2022, Cisco signed on as Official Technology Partner with Spanish soccer team Real Madrid and its home, the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium to make it a fully-connected, digital experience venue, based around the all-important notions of community and fandom.

The successful alliance was extended in the middle of last year with the announcement of some new goals, including the creation of a scalable, high-performance, AI-ready data center at Real Madrid City, the rollout of Cisco Wi-Fi 7 around Real Madrid City, and deployment of a robust 100 Gbps network infrastructure connecting the Santiago Bernabéu stadium to Real Madrid City.

Today at the kick off of Cisco Live EMEA, the club’s CIO Enrique Uriel who expanded on how the relationship between the IT vendor and the sports club works, emphasising the importance of a particular “magic word” - experience:

When you ask me about technology, I'm thinking about fan experience. What's fun experience from the technology standpoint? For us, fan experience is a perfect recipe that has three key ingredients - who, where and how.  The who are the fans, the where is the stadium, and the how is the technology.  Technology is actually the glue between the people and the building. It is the way to connect people with the building.

Real Madrid has built its digital philosophy around five pillars - innovation, connectivity, content, broadcasting, and security. Uriel explained:

Our innovation is in the smart building. It is a new way of making TV. We are a content delivery factory. And of course, when the most important thing is connectivity. Isolated one by one, [each pillar is] not an innovation or a revolution, but all together in the sports industry, believe me, is a revolution.

Buyers beware...

All of this is done against a backdrop of a sector in which time pressures have never been greater. Uriel said:

Time is really critical. Time matters a lot. In the past, technologies used to be usable for four or five years, so you had time to think if you were going to be an innovator, a pioneer, a conservative or even a laggard, But now that time has been reduced dramatically. You have no time to think, so you need leadership. You need the capability for decision-makers to adopt all the technologies that keep you leading the industry. Otherwise, you will be at the end of the queue [and] that means that you are a follower.

This is very difficult for a buyer perspective, he added, citing an example of how fast-moving things are:

Everybody knows about WiFi. WiFi is extremely mature technology. But in five years [things changed]. We started designing the stadium on WiFi 4, we went into RFP in WiFi 5, and we finally deployed WiFi 6. Now we are again renewing for Wi Fi 7, all in in five years. That is terrible. It's very difficult to follow the pace of technology today.

And buyers need to think carefully about what it is that they are being told they need to buy, he added:

We are really proud to say that, together with Cisco, we were one of the first early adopters of IP telephony in 2001, hi-density WiFi in 2010, SDA networks, AV networks, IPTV, all of them.

But on the other hand, we feel that the market seems to impose on you the technologies that you have to adopt. That's very dangerous because if you don't, it looks like you are going to be left out and that's not true. So you have to be really cautious. What is the technology that you will implement? Because not all the technologies are for everybody, believe me, that's dangerous.

So you have to take your time to decide when you are an innovator, when you are a conservative, and where you spend the money. AI is critical, but you need to find the real business case that adapts  to your business, and doesn’t make you waste money and time.

Scouting for talent

Finding talent on the pitch is, of course, a major challenge for any soccer team. The same is true off the pitch it seems. According to Uriel:

There are two problems here, because talent is maybe one of the more difficult things that we have on our hands today. 

The first thing is it's absolutely impossible to have your team absolutely skilled and trained in all the different technologies that are arising - AI, quantum, everything. So what we are doing is keeping the key know how,  the core business, know how, inside our building and have an ecosystem of vendors, key vendors like Cisco, that deliver us the key projects. At the same time they are teaching our team to acquire that [knowledge], transferring that knowledge. That is very critical.

The second problem is a lack of really skilled professionals in the market today. There are a lot of people, a lot of consultants, saying that they are really the key vendor for providing you with all those technologies. Be cautious. That's not true at this moment.

Alongside talent, another ’t’ stands for trust, particularly when it comes to tech delivery. Uriel said:

We have been Cisco users since 2000. Our loyalty is there. But when we were preparing this new project and thinking about this fan experience and delivering the best first-class stadium in the world, one of the first things we started doing was preparing buckets where we can put the name of the companies that can deliver. In the case of connectivity, data center, content delivery, we put all the names of those companies in the top right part of the Garner Magic Quadrant in each particular domain. [in the bucket]. Do you know the only name that was present in all the buckets?

Well, as it’s Cisco Live, the chances are it wasn’t IBM or Oracle or HP or....

Uriel continued:

Together with our experts, we decided to say, 'OK, those this is the company that is the only one that can deliver end-to-end, a seamless value chain, providing robustness, reliability, scalability and a present and a future. There are a lot of maybe cheaper, faster solutions that somebody says are 'out of the box'. They are not!

Cisco and the soccer club worked closely together, recalled Uriel:

We designed three networks. One is the classical IT network.. I call it classical, but it's an SDA network. We were early adopters. That's fantastic, because it provides you not only the capability for providing all the services to any part of the stadium, but in a secure way. That's very important.

The second one is the AV network. Why do we have an AV network? Because we are managing gigabytes and terabytes of information per second. Imagine we have 16, 4k native cameras connected directly to the network, no compression, mixing images and throwing it to the halo with no delay  - that [demands] an incredible performance.

And the third one is a legacy network, level two transport. Why? Because we have a lot of people coming to our stadium to create their own show, and they don't want to use our network, our policies, our firewalls and everything.

He cited the example of the NFL visiting recently:

They came to the studio and they used the campus. They felt really comfortable, and the success was there

There’s always the long shadow of security concerns and Real Madrid is no exception here. As Uriel put it:

The more connected you are, the more exposed you are to a cyber attack. So the cybersecurity architecture that we have in place at Bernabéu Stadium is impressive. We have to homologate solutions. We have to stage red team attacks to all the [possibilities], just to feel comfortable and in that way, [we are] protecting the stadium.