After having numerous incidents involving fans at sporting events, many teams across the world of sports have taken manners in to their own hands. The NFL Code of Conduct went into effect after HBO's "Real Sports" program aired a segment that featured scenes of drunken and unruly behavior by football fans. Among the highlights: Redskins fans getting falling-down drunk in the parking lot, and a crowd of New York Jets fans at Giants Stadium chanting at women to take their tops off.
The National Basketball League instituted a code in 2005, after a fight between fans and players broke out at an Indiana Pacers-Detroit Pistons game. Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League do not have leaguewide policies, but fan behavior is discussed and monitored by the individual clubs.
Major League Soccer is known to have the rudest and loudest fans. The league has also recently enstated a fan code of conduct. These codes of conduct are rules on how to behave when attending the sports game. There are serve consequences like fines and jail time for those who don't comply.
Some professional sports teams have more security cameras to monitor incidents, they do not need consent to video tape people since they are out in a public, televised event. This is one way to unobtrusively keep an eye on fans and fan interaction. They want to see how they can create a family-friendly atmosphere. Some idea included having seats divded into section: loud, very loud, quiet, etc.
Since they can’t observe the thousands of fans at the games, they have a system where fans can do the unobtrusive observing for them.
They are urging fans, who are bothered by other fans, to send an anonymous text message to team security. The security members will stop by the seats and handle the situation. This motivates fans in a way to observe eachother. They can tell security annonymous what people are being disruptive and security can immediately remove the subject without them knowing they were being watch by other fans.
Is this TOO extreme? Well this ESPN article shows the consequences of some bad-behaving fans.
The only way to research and know what is going on at big games is unobtrusively, without the fans knowing. You want them to enjoy the game and not worry about being hurt at a game. The team has to observe and study the behavior of fans to avoid someone getting serverly hurt.
No comments:
Post a Comment