PAM joins VfB Stuttgart's Innovation Day to co-create the future of fan experience

Stuttgart, 28 October 2026. PAM Innovation Ambassador Steve Plummer joined VfB Stuttgart and its Innovation Circle partners inside the MHP Arena for the club's Innovation Day, a full-day co-creation session on the future of the matchday.

VfB Stuttgart brought a dozen partners into one room, including SAP, Mercedes-Benz, MHP, LBBW, HP, fischer, Schwarz Digits, A11, cs.networks, DNA, Richter, Nxtgn and Startup Stuttgart, to work on a single brief: what should the matchday of the future feel like for a fan, and what can the club and its partners build together to deliver it.

A working session, not a showcase

The day followed a format VfB calls co-creation. The club's innovation team set the focus themes, partners presented what they are building, and the room broke into working groups across the stadium lounges. Each group worked ideas through to defined use cases, under the day's motto: von der Idee zum Use Case, from idea to use case.

PAM on the main stage

Plummer presented the PAM platform end to end in a 25-minute main-stage session. The MHP Arena already has a live PAM Smart Map: a 3D model of the stadium and the surrounding NeckarPark, covering gates, parking, the S-Bahn and fan zones.

The session centred on Journey PAMalytics, PAM's view of how fans move through a venue: where they arrive from, which gates they use, where they pause and where queues form. For a club, that view turns matchday movement into a dataset the operations, sponsorship and fan-experience teams can act on.

"Once a club can see the fan's journey, it can design it," Plummer said. "VfB has put its partners around one canvas and asked them to build that journey together. That is exactly how the next generation of fan experience will get made."

What the room explored

Across the working groups, the ideas converged on the fan's journey as the organising idea for the matchday:

- Door-to-seat navigation across transport, parking and gates, guided by the club's app.

- Partner activations, fan zones and hospitality as destinations fans can find on the map.

- The stadium and its surrounding district treated as one connected experience, from arrival to departure.

- These are roadmap themes. Nothing discussed on the day has been announced as a live feature.

Conversations continued through the day with MHP, A11, the fischer group, the Cannstatter Wasen team and OneFootball on how partners, venues and media platforms could build on a shared map of the matchday.

Why it matters

Fan experience is becoming an operations discipline. Clubs that understand how tens of thousands of people move on matchday can plan staffing, retail, security and sponsorship with evidence rather than instinct. Spatial intelligence is the layer that makes that possible, and VfB Stuttgart is building it with its partners rather than waiting for a single vendor to deliver it.

About the partnership

PAM delivers the SmartMap for MHP Arena and works with VfB Stuttgart as a member of its innovation circle. Steve Plummer, serves as the company's Innovation Ambassador for the club.

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