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The Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles have almost two weeks to develop a game plan for Super Bowl LIX in New Orleans Sunday, Feb. 9, but the technology team starts well before that. In fact, the planning and strategy for the next championship game — Super Bowl LX, which will be held in Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara in February 2026 — are well underway.
Too early, you say? Well, it’s premature for the teams that hope to play in the game to make travel plans, but it’s a very different story for the information technology and cybersecurity professionals from the NFL and the San Francisco 49ers, the team that plays its home games at Levi’s Stadium (pictured).
A recent LinkedIn event by Cisco Systems Inc., one of the key providers of the Levi’s Stadium network, featured an in-depth discussion of how much planning, effort and technology goes into providing fast, secure connectivity for the teams, broadcasters, vendors and, of course, the fans who will pack the stadium along with their tens of thousands of mobile devices.
Aaron Amendolia, the NFL’s deputy chief information officer, has worked for the league for 21 seasons. He leads the NFL’s innovation team and oversees event technology and infrastructure. This year’s Super Bowl in New Orleans will be Amendolia’s 18th, more than even the GOAT himself, Tom Brady. He and his team will be busy with the 2025 game, and they’re already immersed in work for next year.
Costa Kladianos is the 49ers’ executive vice president and head of technology. He and his team handle tech for all home games, any postseason games the Niners host and numerous other events at the 68,500-seat stadium. After Super Bowl LX, another big job on his plate will be a different type of football: FIFA World Cup soccer games, some of which will be held at Levi’s Stadium.
“You start to think about all the connectivity needed for the Super Bowl,” Amendolia said. “All the devices that come into a stadium on game day and all the buildout around that. We met with Costa’s team to talk about preparation for LX.”
And on game day, he added, “we’re planning for over 150,000 to 200,000 devices entering this building. But it’s not just about game days, but all the preparation around it. We have many partners, broadcasters, vendors, a diverse group of technology showing up, connecting to the network, and doing everything you need to deliver the games.”
I’ve interviewed many stadium CIOs, and Amendolia’s comments echo those of others, saying that the network is critical to every aspect of holding a game. Last year, I talked with a sports CIO who mentioned how a situation took the network down. He explained how he wasn’t sure it would be up by the game and had to explain to the owners that a game could not occur without a network.
Security systems, ticketing, point-of-sale, medical services and other critical services run on the network. The good news is the network did come back up in time, and the scare enabled the team to build a redundant data center. But this is the challenge that all stadium’s CIOs face and it’s magnified exponentially in a high-profile game, like the Super Bowl.
Wi-Fi plays a massive role in overall stadium connectivity, according to Kladianos. It’s about much more than fans logging in with their cell phones. “Wi-Fi is table stakes right now,” he explained. “Everybody’s bringing their device, everybody’s sharing the great time they’re having at the event, but it’s also what all our backend technology, including point-of-sale systems, runs on. We love to run on Wi-Fi because it just makes us flexible. We can quickly move a sales system, our point of sale outwards. We can get into the lines and go to the in-seat service. It gives us that flexibility to what we want, especially around the gates, getting people through the gates quicker, checking their tickets.”
“AI requires a lot of bandwidth and processing power, and that has to go through the Wi-Fi in the stadium,” Kladianos said. “That becomes super-important as we go there because we want fans not to realize the experience they’re having in the Wi-Fi. We want them to know that it works. We currently have 1,200 access points throughout the stadium, and we’re looking to expand that as we head to 2026 to ensure that everyone has the same great experience they have everywhere else.”
Managing all the devices that require Wi-Fi access is extremely challenging, according to Kladianos. “Even with your best analyst, you need technology and tools to correlate those events,” he said. “AI is really where we’re looking.
Indeed, he added, “we’re going to validate which AI solution is going to return the best results. It’s exciting because you must correlate against something unique to sports. The sensors we have on the field with the players, the cameras we have doing optical tracking, our broadcast cameras capturing and getting that live event out to the points of sale, and the fan devices create a unique environment.”
“We look at AI as an opportunity, and we know with opportunities, there’s also the other side of the coin, which is threats,” Kladianos explained. “You want to be ahead of the game. So, with our partner Cisco, we’re putting in the latest and greatest monitoring solutions and everything they offer on the security side, on our firewalls, using threat intelligence.”
Moreover, he added, the team can take all its data, all its logs on the back end, and quickly use AI to summarize threats, because AI can do it a lot faster. “I have analysts in the group, so that’s really going to help us. In terms of other innovations in the stadium, our strategy for AI is the intelligent stadium,” he said. “We want to see how AI can enable everything we do to engage our fans.”
Few events are as closely watched as the Super Bowl. The 2024 game had more than 123 million viewers in the United States, and the NFL continues attracting new fans worldwide. That growing focus makes each Super Bowl a top-level Homeland Security concern on par with a presidential inauguration.
“Obviously, Super Bowl is a high-profile event, but also a high-value target for adversaries,” said Amendolia. “Our cybersecurity team, our CISO, they’re making sure that we implement AI responsibly, so we’re not causing any vulnerabilities ourselves, and we understand what’s going on in the outside world. It’s a lot of education and putting the right tools in place, but also communication with our partners. You think of all the different organizations from across the world, international broadcasters, domestic broadcasters, and digital experiences that come to the Super Bowl; you’re now bringing a whole ecosystem trying to get out their content around this live event with all the tools they bring in.”
Added Kladianos: “We have a full security operation center. We work closely with the NFL, local security agencies, the FBI and local police. We run different technology in terms of our high-definition camera systems using IP on the back end running through that network, making it super-important to have that low latency. These cameras are not just cameras; now, they’re analyzing super HD and super zoom. Using some of the AIs and the cameras, you can spot potential threats before they happen.”
Amendolia said his cyber team is using logging tools such as Splunk’s to bring everything to one place, as well as Cisco’s suite of security tools. He cited some stats: “350,000 connections blocked to malicious and blacklisted sites. 39,000 intelligence services detected and dealt with. 1,600 intrusion attempts foiled. Those are just the years we’ve worked with Cisco at the Super Bowl. These distinct things keep incrementally increasing. The target is there.”
Though this is a sports-related story, the lessons learned can be applied to companies in all industries. A recent ZK Research/theCUBE Research survey found that 93% of respondents believe the network to be more critical to business operations than it was two years ago.
However, I find that with most companies, the network does not get the same level of C-level interest as the cloud or compute platforms, but the reality is that the network is the business for most companies. Ensuring a secure, rock-solid network is crucial to business operations in all industries.
Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.
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