The ROAR Podcast: Lauren Adams

[upbeat music] When the final whistle blew at World Cup matches in New Jersey this summer, fans weren't ready to go home. The energy was electric, but the stadium was rigged with parking, so the party went somewhere else, miles away to Times Square. Researchers who tracked that movement have a name for it, afterglow. They argue that every bit of it that drifts away from the venue is dwell time and goodwill left on the table. Today, Adam sits down with Lauren Adams, Global Director of Lifestyle Research at Gensler and lead author of "The Fandom Effect: Sports Urbanism twenty twenty-six." It's a three-part study from the Genler-- Gensler Research Institute, Oxford Economics, and ROAR. Research looked before, during, and after the tournament. They surveyed nearly six thousand fans across the US and Canada, tracked fans' posts tied to every host stadium in real time, went back to host city residents once the last match was playing. What they found matters to anyone building a sports-anchored district. Fans use words like "we" and "us" seventy-eight percent more often when posting from the plazas and streets outside the stadiums than from inside the stadium itself. When they researched for words like "goosebumps" and "electric," the collective language jumped a hundred and eighty-nine percent. And Lauren puts it, "Public space that inspires awe equals belonging." They dig, dig into where the experience breaks down, starting with the entry line, which Lauren calls the off-rizone, get into why super fans cluster in their venues, why locals and families want completely different things from the same district, and what designers should build now for stadiums that will look, like, very different in ten years. It's a conversation about loneliness, design, and why crowds outside the stadium may be the most valuable part of game day. I'm Brice Clinton, and this is the ROAR Podcast. [upbeat music]

Welcome to the ROAR Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Grossman. With me today is Lauren Adams. Lauren, thanks for joining the podcast.

Thanks for having me, Adam.

Yeah. Well, we're here to talk about the paper that you were the lead author, and ROAR played a role in creating, but let's talk about it. So what is the paper? What did we do? And what, uh, in particular, what did Gensler just, uh, publish today?

So today we launched and published a paper called "The Fandom Effect: Sports Urbanism twenty twenty-six," and that is a three-part mixed method study where we did a baseline survey before the World Cup started to understand how do people use the sports venues and districts in their community, how often do they visit, what's their feeling about them, what role does it play in their lives, and what would they want from them in order to, uh, visit on non-game days. So we did that in April when the World Cup was, like, not, you know, foremost in people's consciousness. And then during the World Cup, you know, the part that we did with you, we did a social media listening study where we geo-fenced all the stadiums to be able to follow the fan conversation as it was happening across the full tournament, and we did all kinds of cool AI, um, powered language analysis and