I’m going to deviate from my normal topics for a moment and share the opening game day experience that I had yesterday at the new 49ers stadium in Santa Clara, California. I had been providing some comments live during the game via Twitter and actually got some nice feedback and responses from vendors and partners. To this point, I wanted to expand on some of my observations.
The opening event at Levi’s Stadium was a football match, just not of the American pointy-ball type. The San Jose Earthquakes played the Seattle Sounders in a regular season MLS (Major League Soccer) match. This match was intended to be the dress rehearsal for the 49ers season and rather than fill it to the brim, they sold only the lower sections. That still meant an attendance of over 48,000 people.

 
As was to be expected, there were things that went really well, and things that didn’t go so well. I’m going to start with the negatives. There are far fewer of them than positives, which is great!

Not So Great

1. Crowd Flow around Club Seats
When you first walk up the big stairs and get the big view of the stadium, the signs make it look as though you can go left or right. Our tickets were way on the other side, and we decided to take the slightly longer route around to check out the stadium since we had time.
As we worked our way around we ran into quite a traffic jam of people. It turns out there is one area where only ‘club seat’ holders can go. There were no signs to indicate this and it led to a huge bottleneck of people being turned around in a relatively narrow area.
To avoid this, you can go around the stadium all the way if you walk the nice large walkway behind the seats, but we learned this just by exploring before the game. No signs helped with this.
Throughout the game, we could look across the stadium and see the traffic jam at the turnaround point around the Club Seats never cleared. Some better signage, or someone stationed further back, before the narrow walkway, would solve this.

2. VTA Light Rail
My experience with the VTA system on game day was largely positive. However, in order to be so I had to leave the game almost 20 minutes early.
Getting There:
We drove to downtown San Jose and parked in one of the validated parking garages. Then we grabbed an early dinner and some beers downtown (and validated our $5 parking) while watching the VTA light rail pass by from our seats. We could see the trains starting to get busy around 5:00 pm (game was at 7:30) so we finished up and hopped on a train without any issues. We even got seats in the last car.
Getting Back:
The problem with post-game is that the crowd doesn’t spread out their rides over several hours – everyone is ready to leave at almost the same time. We didn’t want to stand in line forever so we ended up leaving the game 18 minutes early (which is a large part of the soccer game) to stack the deck in our favor. That ended up being the best decision we could have made.
We got to the platform, only a few people deep, about 15 minutes before the game ended. We stood there for the whole 15 minutes watching the lines pile up deep behind us. And the game wasn’t even over! The problem was that VTA didn’t start running the trains until the game was over. If they had started about 20 minutes earlier they could have gotten ahead of the line pile-up. We got on the first train out and made it home by about 10:45.
We were extremely lucky to have a smooth VTA commute to and from the game but a quick search of Twitter shows that we are in the minority. And I am disappointed that I had to miss a large chunk of the game in order to make that happen.

3. Niners Player Parking Skills
Okay, this was just funny. As we walked the exterior of the stadium before the game started we watched several of the 49ers players pull into the player parking lot to their assigned spots. Most of them had trouble parking correctly. I hope they have more accuracy and skill when the season starts.

4. Entry and Bag Policy
The NFL has some really strict and annoying entry policies. No bags, unless it is a clear ziploc or one of their pre-approved clear bags (which of course they will be happy to sell to you!). They had a bag check for people who weren’t aware of this, which is nice, but I heard it was a mess picking things up after the game.
They also don’t allow drums and noise amplifiers. This puts a big damper on the atmosphere of a soccer stadium since loud drum-pounding supporter’s groups make up so much of the game day experience.
Hey, at least I didn’t have to take off my shoes when I went through the metal detector.

Nice Job

1. Supporters sections
Despite the lack of drums and noise making tools, I was impressed with the way the supporter’s section voices resonated across the stadium. They were seated in the end zone opposite from our ~20 yard line seats, and I could hear the chants clearly. Nice job, guys!
2. Bathrooms
Lots of bathrooms around the stadium and I never encountered a line or a dirty stall. I only had one beer so I didn’t have to visit often, however.

3. The food and beer selection
We didn’t eat at the stadium but the food selection looked great. The curry smelled fantastic. The prices are, naturally, astronomical – what stadium doesn’t have high prices? I paid $11 for a Goose Island IPA. They also had a section called ‘The Tap House” that had a decent looking beer selection (at least I saw Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, Lagunitas IPA, and Stone Arrogant Bastard). If I’m going to pay $11 a beer you can bet I’m not getting a Bud Light.

4. Wifi and In Stadium Technology
Levi’s Stadium has free wifi, and I didn’t even have to login or accept some crazy terms of service. I just connected and it was smooth sailing the whole game. Fast and reliable – you don’t see that often with free wifi, especially in a densely packed venue. Nice job to the technology partners.
The big screens were also fantastic. Bright and clear even when the sun was shining directly on them. I could tell they were tweaking the sound levels throughout the game but for the most part everything was clear and loud enough.

5. Bike Parking
One of the entry gates had designated bike barking *behind* the security and ticket check. I really liked that they let people in through security and the ticket check with their bikes to a rack where they could feel safer leaving their bike.

6. Staff and Staffing Levels
Other than the Club seating fiasco described above, everywhere I went was quick and efficient. We got through security and ticket check quickly, we did some shopping in the 49ers team store and were in and out in a jiffy, there were no lines in the bathrooms and they were always clean, and even the beer line moved quickly. There were staff and employees helping and guiding people at every step. It almost felt over-staffed, but as a dry-run I’m sure they wanted to give everyone a chance. All employees were friendly and courteous and yelling “Go Quakes!” Everyone seemed excited and happy to be there. Even the LEO working the stadium and public transit were in good spirits and joking around with people.
I noticed that part of the uniform was black jeans. Everyone had nice new crisp dark black jeans – Levi’s, naturally! A nice little touch to tie together the stadium branding.
7. Quakes Win!
Congrats to the Earthquakes for breaking in the new stadium with a win over Seattle. Thank God – if we had lost we’d forever be blamed for cursing the new stadium.