The Cashless Ryder Cup and the Future of Society
The Ryder Cup at Whistling Straits will accept no cash from attendees, the latest sports event to follow a post-pandemic trend. It's being sold as convenient and clean, but what else is going on?
On Fyre
All regular Netflix viewers will likely be aware of the Fyre Festival.
Even if you decided the documentary, which was among the streaming service’s highest ranked shows of 2019, was not your thing, it’s very likely that at some point you were greeted with its auto-playing promo trailer almost every time you powered up the app. A prominent place on the Netflix home screen is among the most valuable pieces of digital real estate there is, and Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened occupied that Park Avenue spot for several weeks after its debut.
The documentary was one of two acclaimed pieces of work (the other, Fyre Fraud on Hulu, grabbed a much smaller slice of global couch attention but was also well received) about the ill-fated Fyre Festival in 2017, which had quickly become notorious in certain echo chambers of social media and whose notoriety went global following the zeitgeist-defining dual movie treatment two years later.
The debacle was seen as a touchstone of our times, where the cult of celebrity, the oppressiveness and irrationality of social media influence, the lurid appeal of a sun-sea-sand-and-sex Caribbean jaunt away from the ordinariness of home and, in the final reckoning, the fakeness of the entire thing, all converged to show us what some of us had become, and what all of us were on the way to becoming.
Fyre was to have been loudly and proudly cashless, signifying the gathering of pace towards a world where all earthly inconveniences would be replaced by the speed, availability and reliability of full digitization.
In the aftermath of the documentary treatment, Tappit, a cashless payments provider aimed to cash in (chi-ching) on a slice of that global attention by publishing a blog outlining “What we learnt from Fyre”.
The blog concluded—conveniently for the business model, although, it has to be said, not exactly unreasonably—that going cashless is “a cool thing to do” (a beautifully designed wristband that customers know has their money on it and saves on the clutter of lugging a wallet around a festival or on a beach can be an extra “cool factor” that sets your event apart), and that cashless is the future of events (there are huge benefits [for event organisers] to going cashless. Valuable data and insights are gained ... helping you to totally understand your fan and enable targeted marketing; profits are increased through faster transactions … increased spend, a reduction in admin costs, and … theft and fraud are virtually eliminated).
It may be that the generational divide prevents some of us above a certain age from ever having pondered “the clutter of lugging a wallet”, but the trend is undeniable: cashless is coming, and it won’t be stopped.
In fact, it’s already here.
The Cashless Arena
Tappit has agreed deals with NFL franchises Jacksonville Jaguars and Kansas City Chiefs, making TIAA Bank Field and Arrowhead Stadium now completely cashless. (A note on the Jaguars’ fan guide page tersely points out: “Fans should plan accordingly as ATMs have been discontinued and are no longer available.”) Other franchises such as the San Francisco 49ers, Atlanta Falcons and Seattle Seahawks have followed suit, and 26 of the 30 Major League Baseball teams announced that they would go cashless in 2021.
Last December, a matter of weeks after news of a Covid vaccine breakthrough and as fans contemplated a return to some form of sports event normality in 2021, the NFL and Visa announced that “the future is here”, pledging that all Super Bowls from that point forward would be proudly cash-free.
The 2020 Ryder Cup, which starts tomorrow (Friday, September 24th, 2021), is just the latest high-profile event to follow the trend and adopt a strictly cashless system for all attendees.
Official merchandise shops on site will only accept American Express, MasterCard, Visa and Discover Card. Those payment options are also available at concession and drinks stands, which will also, naturally, have Apple Pay and Google Pay facilities available.
All these moves over the past 12 months are predicated on the widely held feeling that paper money has become somehow dangerous and at the very least partly complicit in the spread of Covid-19, with the zero-touch digital world now cleaner and safer than the grubby and dangerous real one.
As Sporticast hosts Scott Soshnick and Matt Bok put it in a podcast discussing a controversially cashless WWE event in August, when cashless payments system experienced problems that left frustrated customers unable to pay for food, drinks, or merchandise:
“Get rid of that dirty Covid cash!”
The journey towards cashless events (and a cashless society in general) has been proceeding at pace for several years and, like so many other things, Covid has only hastened the trend.
But are we to think that this trend is mostly for our convenience? That we should be thankful for being spared the dreadful inconvenience (and clutter!) of lugging a wallet around a venue?
Cui bono? was a question often asked by ancient Roman stoic philosophers.
Who gains?
While the Tappit blog made sure to mention a survey that had canvassed the opinions of 800 festival goers around the world, finding that 73% were happy to dispense with the rank inconvenience of cash and coins, those other benefits it outlined (“gain valuable data and insights”, “totally understand your fan”, “enable targeted marketing”, “profits are increased through faster transactions”, “increased spend” and “reduction in admin costs”) are more telling for the future appeal of cashless to organisers and the direction things are inevitably going, a direction towards which the afterburners have been turned on by the pandemic.
All those factors are almost priceless for event organisers seeking to run events in the most profitable lucrative way possible.
As anyone who has seen the proliferation of data centres around the world can attest—in Ireland, Amazon has spent more than €2 billion on such projects in the past decade, and is currently building two new data centres there that will require more energy than the population of Kilkenny city and has regulators worried about its knock-on effects on energy availability across the country—data really is the 21st century equivalent of the gold rushes of 19th century America.
Golf and the Cashless Economy
Intellitix, the Montréal, Canada-based provider of cashless payment systems and RFID access control for events (RFID alone, or radio-frequency identification, is the technology often used in “smart” wristbands typically used at events and festivals, and is estimated to be a global market worth more than $10 billion) has been the provider of the technology for the Ryder Cup since the 2014 edition at Gleneagles, Scotland. (Note: it’s not clear whether Intellitix is the provider of the tech at Whistling Straits this week.)
In a case study published on the Intellitix website, it outlined the brand benefits to the Ryder Cup from the data its technology was able to gather, including (emphasis mine):
“Seven custom brand activations tailored to each brand’s objectives and the event as a whole including major sponsors BMW, Johnnie Walker, Standard Life Investments and Active Scotland”
“Across 33 event touch points, RFID wristband technology excited (sic) guests to become more than just sports spectators, they became event and brand advocates on-site and online”
“44,527 total on-site brand interactions”
“59,176 email accounts linked to RFID wristbands”
Now, we won’t be getting too Marxist about brand activation, brand advocacy, brand interactions or linked email accounts.
Golf is a global business estimated to be worth north of $80 billion, Callaway and Acushnet (the parent company of Titleist and FootJoy) each posted record annual earnings of approximately $1.7 billion in 2019 and Patrick Cantlay claimed $15 million in a weekend at the Tour Championship earlier this month. (Plus, the whole point of this newsletter is to offer up some observations and insights on the place where golf, business and money meet.)
But let’s be clear on the real motivations for cash-free events.
We might be fed a relentless narrative double-underlining the convenience and cleanliness of cashless, but scrape at the surface and the rationale behind its rapid onset is easy to see.
The real driving factor of the no-cash economy is the mining and manipulation of all available data around your movements, preferences, behavior and habits, whether you’re conscious of them or not, by corporations, by governments and, inevitably, by nefarious agents who stand to profit, now and into the future, from your quick trip to the merch tent.
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