Several pro sports teams, including Mets and the LAFC, are testing facial-recognition to make entry into stadiums as touchless as possible during the pandemic
Los Angeles Football Club wants to ‘move everything to face,’ while the New York Mets are testing system on players and staff
Context & Ripple Effects
Stadiums have been inching toward biometric gates for years: Madison Square Gate quietly ran facial recognition for security as far back as the 2018 report on MSG's system, while MLB's first touchless move was the Oakland Athletics' NFC tap-to-enter pilot in 2017. The pandemic turned a convenience feature into a health-driven imperative.
LAFC wants to 'move everything to face,' and the Mets are trialing their system on players and staff rather than fans first — a lower-stakes rollout that treats the clubhouse as the proving ground before turnstiles follow. Later reporting shows where this leads: over a dozen US stadiums now run facial recognition for entry, security, and even sentiment analysis, with privacy advocates in active protest.
First-order effects
- Mets players and staff become the test population: their faces get enrolled into an entry system before any fan-facing deployment, making the roster the first dataset of MLB's touchless push.
- LAFC's 'move everything to face' goal shifts its gate operations from ticket-scanning staff to camera-and-software verification, changing what the club must secure and who can be denied entry.
Second-order effects
- Rival clubs face pressure to match touchless entry once two marquee teams normalize it — the Slate inventory of a dozen-plus stadiums suggests the copycat wave already arrived.
- Privacy advocates gain concrete targets: each new venue deployment becomes a flashpoint for biometric-data rules, as the later Wired coverage of protests at major league venues shows.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, biometric identity becomes default stadium infrastructure — tickets, concessions, and security all keyed to the face — forcing leagues to decide whether fans can opt out and regulators to write the rules that currently don't exist.
- Sports venues function as the public's first routine encounter with facial recognition at scale, setting precedents for how biometric screening spreads to transit hubs, offices, and other mass-entry spaces.
The trend: Pandemic-era hygiene is accelerating stadiums' shift from tickets and NFC taps to face-as-credential, with privacy backlash arriving on roughly the same timeline as adoption.