About two years ago, my son Callum and I had the most extraordinary opportunity to see the New York Giants qualify for the playoffs in the NFL at their MetLife Stadium in New York.
I had not been to a stadium in the United States since the 1990s, but the experience was out of this world; exactly what you might expect from American Sport: service, customer focus.
Entry into the stadium was seamless; there was almost no queue whatsoever, security was tight, but quick; getting to our seat was simple and easy; getting to the food concessions – brilliant; there were so many of those that you never had to queue for anything easy to pay, a wide range of what you wanted, tonnes of toilets.
It was just a brilliant experience all around. 3.5 hours of entertainment on the highest level, focused on the individual paying to be there.
Contrast that with my trip to the new all-singing, all-dancing CO-OP Live arena on Saturday night to see Sam Fender (It's worth setting this against the fact that Nancy, who works with us here, was also at the gig and didn't seem to share my views on this).
We arrived in a reasonable time, but of course, there was nowhere to park. You can pre-book parking beside the arena, which we didn't do, but you'd never get out of it within about two hours.
So we booked some private parking just down the road, but that's carnage. Trying to find your space and your place was not fun at all; it was difficult to get there, and the transport links were pretty terrible.
I've been to the Etihad Stadium before, but it's not magic.
And so, then we walked in the hellish weather of wind and rain up to the CO-OP Live arena, and when we got there, we found out that there was one entrance for standing tickets (entrance C) and there was a 30-minute queue around temporary barriers to get in there to be checked by security.
Let's take a minute here to understand that this is an entirely brand new facility, so surely someone thought about entering and exiting it while they were designing it with a piece of paper from the start.
I have designed a facility from scratch myself, having a million choices to do it however I wanted and understanding that people had to get in, out, and park.
Who thought of this?
Who thought that when it got to its busiest times, we would use temporary metal barriers to herd people like cattle to get them in?
When we got to the security, there were some scanners, you know, the ones you would walk through at an airport, and there were also separate tables where people had handheld wands.
Why did they have both?
Why didn't they just have one?
Did they not think there would be this many people coming into the arena? Were they shocked by its success?
We had to wait for ages to go through the scanners; it was a total shambles.
When we got there, we could scan our tickets on a human-free QR code device, which was really cool and brilliant, but that was offset by the fact that we were soaking wet and freezing from having stood outside for 30 minutes to get in.
When we got in, we couldn't get into the toilet. There were simply not enough men's toilets in the place (while I realise this is beautifully ironic for ladies who have forever had to queue for the longest time to use toilets in these facilities, surely people would have thought there would have been enough toilets for men and women).
The arena itself is mid, as my son would say. It's not dazzling or fantastic; it's big, but that's about it.
It's just another example of how we don't seem to get it right.
I know somebody is making a tonne of money out of that right at the top.
They should be making a little bit less money, maybe to put on another entry point for people in the standing area, maybe a few more toilets.
Time to rethink who steals the money and who the customer is.
Blog Post Number - 4016
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