Destination 2017: Minneapolis-St. PaulBy Alison J. Stein

To lure these avid fans back to the stadium, teams across the NFL are offering amenities to reproduce and then surpass the home-watching experience. And so the Minnesota Vikings’ new stadium is entirely equipped with fast WiFi, while the aforementioned fantasy sports lounge provides an app-loaded tablet at each comfy couch and is practically wallpapered with screens and displays “pushing fantasy content to the left, right and behind you,” says John Penhollow, vice president of corporate and technology partnerships at the Vikings. In total there are 2,000 screens in the stadium. In Club Purple, in addition to an excellent view of the field, he says, “anyone sitting on those couches can see stats nonstop.” And anyone who gets up from the couches and walks over to Club Purple’s outdoor party deck will get a magnificent views of the skylines of Minneapolis and St. Paul—where a growing number of companies are working to create the technology that fuels modern sports—both the fantasy and the traditional real-life variety. Quietly, slowly, the Twin Cities have become a hotbed for sports technology innovation. For instance, the stats broadcast on all those screens in the U.S. Bank Stadium—and indeed anywhere the NFL is broadcast—are crunched just a few blocks away at Sportradar, the exclusive data provider for the NFL, NBA, NHL and NASCAR. Sportradar was founded as SportsData in Minneapolis in 2010, and though it’s since been acquired by a Swiss firm, the company plans to stay right where it is. In its commitment to its hometown, Sportradar is not alone. Its sports-tech compatriots include companies like SportsEngine, SportsHub Technologies, LeagueSafe, Bleachr, to name just a few. The presence of businesses like these, and the workforce and research that sustain them, are reasons why the Milken Institute moved Minnesota into its top category for state science and tech hubs in 2016, joining California and Massachusetts, and why Minneapolis ranks in the top 15 out of 50 American cities for its strength at drawing tech talent, according to a 2016 study by real estate firm CBRE.

“Minneapolis has become this weird haven for fantasy sports employers and operators,” says Minneapolis-based Paul Charchian, president of the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. Putting it in slightly different terms, “Sports tech has become a significant differentiator for the Minneapolis-St. Paul region,” says Peter Frosch, vice president of strategic partnerships at Greater MSP, the local economic development organization. While Minneapolis-St. Paul isn’t about to topple the nation’s well-established coastal tech capitals, it’s definitely a force to be reckoned with when it comes to sports tech. “We’re seeing a pretty rapid clustering of sports-tech companies, and an ecosystem developing to support and nurture sports-tech startups,” Frosch says.

Why Minneapolis? For one thing, there’s an intense degree of sports involvement here. “We’re unique in that we have every level of sports organization at our fingertips—besides all the pro sports, we also have college sports, great athletic departments in high schools and youth organizations,” says Carson Kipfer, cofounder of SportsEngine, which provides tech tools to help manage sports teams, from amateur to pro, and was recently acquired by NBC Sports Group. Minneapolis is one of the smallest cities in the nation to have a home team for every major league sport, and finance website WalletHub ranked it 10th among 244 cities for its passionate football fans. “People here have a deep history in the world of sports themselves,” says Kipfer, speaking of sports-tech entrepreneurs. “They’re creating solutions that speak directly to their own needs.”

They’re also likely to have the skills to do so. The city and state have a long history in technology, particularly relating to healthcare, going back to the Mayo Clinic’s founding in 1889. Inventions such as the hearing aid and the battery-powered pacemaker came out of Minneapolis, and the city is home to powerhouses Medtronic and UnitedHealthcare, among other large data-driven companies. These major magnets attract science and technology research, talent and investment—health-related tech accounts for the largest share of venture capital investments in the region over the past decade, says Margaret Anderson Kelliher, president and CEO of the Minnesota High Tech Association, a nonprofit that helps to develop the state’s science and tech sectors. In this way, health IT functions as sports tech’s less sexy older brother. Kelliher sees it as a natural progression of skills and expertise from medicine to sports medicine to sports technology. “No doubt this has led to concentration in the sports-tech area,” she says.

To inherent interest and a skilled workforce, mix in a hearty dose of “Minnesota nice,” a widespread reputation for being helpful and supportive that extends to the business community. In focus groups conducted by Greater MSP in 2016, local tech workers reported that in contrast to other cities, colleagues were more willing to offer support and share best practices without expecting anything in return, says Frosch. “We don’t have the kind of bare-knuckled individualism that other markets might have.”

This attitude has coalesced in tangible form in the Pitch, a new incubator and coworking space for sports-tech businesses designed to formalize what had been an ad-hoc arrangement in the Twin Cities. The Pitch is housed on the third floor of SportsEngine, which cofounded the venture. Sports or lifestyle startup companies apply for membership and, if accepted, receive mentorship as well as a place to work—without giving up any equity. “We really want to make Minneapolis a sports-tech hub,” says Cody Haugen, sales manager at Sportradar, which works closely with the Pitch. “This city will support you and the companies here will support you to grow as a true partnership.” This sentiment isn’t all sweet altruism, however: Should the next sports-tech Mark Zuckerberg come out of the Pitch, they’re likely to be another important customer for Sportradar’s analytics empire, Haugen says. Which is why Frosch stresses that “Minnesota nice” is shrewder than a warm smile. “Beyond kindness, it’s productive,” he says.

To be sure, the future of the sports-tech industry in Minneapolis is not without its challenges. Fantasy sports, which creates much of the new demand for sports tech, is fighting a state-by-state legal battle to distinguish it from highly regulated gambling; while daily fantasy sports is legal in Minnesota, an effort to have it declared explicitly so stalled in the legislature last year. That kind of uncertainty tends to spook investors.

Separately, the state has also long offered an angel investor tax credit, an important funding source for sports-tech startups. The legislation that supports that tax credit requires new funding and will sunset on December 31, says Kelliher, a former speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives. “That didn’t happen last round in legislation; we’ll come back to the issue next year,” she says.

What’s more, there are more tech jobs in Minneapolis than there are people to fill them. “The Twin Cities is a great town for a lot of reasons: The lifestyle is excellent, it’s a good place for people to live—but it can be a challenge to recruit the right kind of talent we need,” says Rob Phythian, founder and CEO of SportsHub Technologies and a serial entrepreneur who cofounded the company that was acquired by Sportradar, among other sports-tech ventures. “We have to get potential recruits over the January cold hurdle,” he says. This isn’t just an abstraction—Minneapolis is the coldest major metropolitan area in the U.S., with an average winter temperature just a tick chillier than Anchorage, Alaska. “We just have to dig a little harder, entice them with bonuses and so on,” says Phythian, who compares Minneapolis in January with Phoenix in July.  But Minneapolis and St. Paul do have an advantage: a quality of life so appealing that people who move here tend to stay here.

And no matter how cold the winter, Twin Cities sports tech shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, it will soon get another boost in the form of NFL-team-sized seed money. For their next large construction project, the Vikings are building a training facility in Eagan, just south of St. Paul. The plans include a tech accelerator for startup companies, in which the team might eventually invest. Only a handful of other pro sports teams—notably the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Philadelphia 76ers—have tried such a project, still a relatively untested proposition.

“It’s something we’re taking a very serious look at,” says the Vikings’ Penhollow. “We’re very interested in learning more about companies that are looking for that first opportunity. They may have a great idea and may need some assistance in funding or resources or partners to develop what that idea could be.”

The details are still being hashed out, with an announcement expected within a year. “To be able to launch a company with a great idea?” Penholow says. “That would be a dream scenario.” It sounds like U.S. Bank Stadium won’t be the Vikings’ last addition to the local skyline.