-by Cameron Michels, Deepa Sivarajan, and Leslie McCallum
*This is an excerpt from writing originally posted here – in this version we offer a more historical perspective, emphasizing FIFA as a mechanism for surveillance capitalism, within and beyond Seattle. [“Fight the Impacts” art created by Protect Our Pitch 206]
The Stadium-to-Prison Pipeline
The modern specter of stadiums becoming prisons is a horrifying and blatant demonstration of the way these facilities can be utilized by the state to enact violence on the people. Some examples of this fucked up practice:
- Following the 1973 Chilean coup d’état, the Estadio Nacional Julio Martínez Prádanos was horrifically turned into a prison where upwards of 20,000 people were incarcerated and hundreds murdered within the span of two months. The Estadio Nacional Sports Park is still in use today and has a memorial for the political prisoners.
- In Manaus, Brazil, the capital of the Amazonas, there was a thankfully widely rejected and unrealized proposal by judge and prison system director Sabino Marques to use Arena da Amazônia, built for the 2014 World Cup, to detain people from the over-populated local prison.
- In the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people, the Israeli army turned Yarmouk Stadium into a detention and torture center in December 2023. Yarmouk Stadium in Gaza City is one of the oldest in Palestine and where many Olympic athletes have trained. The remains of the stadium, which Israel demolished in in January 2024, is now where thousands of displaced Palestinians are forced to reside in flimsy tents, where they are still terrorized by Israeli forces.
- Following US Executive Order 9066 in 1942, there were fifteen “Civilian Assembly Centers” used for temporary detainment until larger, more remote concentration camps could be built to incarcerate over 120,000 Japanese Americans. Seven of these detention centers were located on converted horse tracks.
These instances of stadiums as prisons share a similarity to sports arenas becoming the sites of refugee camps and other types of displacement
Surveillance and Detention Built Into the Infrastructure
Modern sport is often a site for the celebration of toxic masculinity and violence. Fans are expected to get rowdy, consume alcohol, and be so passionate about their teams that they verbally and sometimes physically fight fans of the opposing team. This charged atmosphere is only intensified in the hyper-capitalist environment of the stadium featuring predatory advertising for things like gambling and alcohol.
These elements are known to lower inhibition, yet punishment is the primary response to fans who do not manage their belligerence and rowdiness effectively. Some stadiums are built with holding cells, jail cells, and a few even have their own court! These systems of punishment are necessarily fueled by excessive surveillance. Here are a few examples of how these mechanisms become part of the fan experience:
- Veteran’s Stadium in Philadelphia, which hosted Eagles NFL games from 1971 to 2003, had both a courtroom and a jail. In response to a brawl in 1997, Eagles Court was created, a place where fans, most of whom were experiencing intoxication, were charged and fined. A storage room without ventilation, referred to as “The Sweat Box”, was turned into the holding cell, where fans would wait their turn to go in front of the theJudge. Eagles Court was located in the stadium for one year and then went to a police station, further cementing the formal carceral ties. Eagles Court ended in 2003 when the team moved to Lincoln Financial Field, but this current Eagle stadium still has a holding cell.
- At least one of the stadiums where MWC games will be played, Texas’s AT&T Stadium, has a municipal court and holding cells in it! Opened in 2009, this stadium boasts a fully operational detention center, with holding cells, a courtroom where city of Arlington judges preside, and police ready to take people to jail. The belief is that this swift processing of people and doling out punishment serves as a deterrent, increasing fan “safety”.
- Recent reports exposed the troubling magnitude of surveillance that sports fans are subjected to while attending games at Madison Square Garden in New York City. The owner, James Dolan, has used facial recognition technology to deny entry to people with who he has personal grievances, and in an incredibly fucked up move, he used his “spy machine” to track a trans woman’s every move while she was attending Knicks games for over two years, despite the fact that she had committed zero violations.
Stadium As Border
“When we think about borders, we often think about securitization as happening at the site of the border: that line drawn on the map. But bordering regimes, as you note, are multiplying: they’re everywhere, they’reinternalized within the nation state, they’re externalized beyond the nation state. I’m not the first person to say it but this is central to understanding bordering regimes because borders are not only about demarcating space and territory, these regimes are also about reproducing and maintaining racial capitalism, racial citizenship, imperialism, and more.”
– Harsha Walia, author of Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
Upon crossing the nebulous expanse of the stadium’s border, fans become subject to further surveillance. Entering stadiums requires fans to explicitly share their identity with stadium ownership groups and their partners. All tickets must be purchased through FIFA and the FIFA mobile app is required for entry, which, depending on individual phone settings, can then become a way to physically track attendees long after they’veleft the game. Lumen, like Seattle’s other major sports venues, is also cashless, requiring all in-stadium purchases to be through credit cards and apps. This provides another source of tracking – and future marketing – to which fans must acquiesce just to buy a hot dog.
That’s only the start to the digital surveillance at the matches. And to better understand the threat of such surveillance, it’s useful to refer to the concept of the panopticon, which was originally a prison design thought up by philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. Bentham posited that if a prison were built with the cells in a rotunda that could all be seen from a central watch tower staffed by one guard, then, even though the guard could not actually watch all cells at once, the incarcerated people would not know when the guard was looking towards their cell, meaning that they would have to be on good behavior all the time. In the 20th century, social theorists like Michel Foucault used the panopticon as a metaphor for the ways that modern disciplinary society lead people to police themselves and their communities. And 21st century sociologists have pointed out that constant digital surveillance situates us in a new kind of panopticon.
The digital panopticon at Lumen Field begins with cameras. It’s unclear what kind of CCTV system Lumen has for the inside areas of the stadium, but they proudly advertise cameras that can take capture every section of the outdoor seats. The Seattle Seahawks, the NFL team that plays at Lumen Field, has contracted a company called Momento to take multiple photos of each section of seats during their games. This is ostensibly tosupplement the fan experience, allowing fans to download photos of themselves at live games through the company’s website or mobile app. In reality, their purpose is to give participating sports teams even more dataon their fanbase to increase sales.
The Momento photos raise massive privacy concerns. The teams retain the rights to your likeness – always a scary proposition in this world of deepfakes – but even worse, anyone can access the photos on their website or app, not only the teams and their fans. Unlike almost every other tech product out there right now, you don’t have to create an account with Momento, nor do you have to provide proof that you were at a game in order to see the photos from it. We tested it out: to find photos from a match, all they ask for is your date of birth, the game you want to search through, and the seat numbers. You can also search through multiple games and multiple seat sections.
Momento’s CEO claims that they are honoring privacy concerns by limiting fans from accessing the platform too many times to download photos, but it’s not clear what “too many times” actually means or how it is enforced. Fans can also opt out of having their seat photographed, but that requires them to know that there are photos being taken in the first place, and when you go to Memento’s fan access page (here’s the page for the Seahawks, for example), the button to opt out has been made so tiny that it’s near-invisible. There appears to be nothing to stop police or ICE from accessing these photos either.
All of these measures already existed at Lumen Field prior to this year, but with the MWC comes another surveillance tool: drones, which are autonomous aerial aircraft that can be used for anything from videography to warfare. King County has trained 50 deputies over the past two years to work with drones that are being used during the MWC matches. The escalation in drone use during the MWC is ostensibly to counter possible threats from other drones. In the past, only federal law enforcement could employ counter-drone measures, but thanks to the Safer Skies Act, which President Trump signed into law in December 2025, local law enforcement can now be cross-deputized to disable unauthorized drones. The law also made $500 million available to World Cup host cities for counter-drone security, with at least $19 million of that going to Seattle.
While KCSO claims that the drones will only be sent to active threats, not hovering over the stadiums just for surveillance, it’s unclear where the line is for that either, especially since drones are often used alongside “predictive” policing and AI that relies on algorithms to forecast where crimes are expected to be committed. Such algorithms not only violate individual privacy; they also exacerbate and reinforce racism and the other systemic biases that are already at the core of the prison-industrial complex.
There is still a role for stadium staff to make sporting events safer, but it is not in surveillance or other law enforcement tactics. Since the stadium is the physical space where events like the MWC occur, their leadership and staff should be focused on making that space as accessible and community-oriented as possible. Lumen has some great accessibility resources already: wheelchair escort services from gate to seat, autism toolkits that include headphones for noise and sensory toys, Assisted Listening Devices, a low-sensory room for anyone feeling overstimulated, closed captioning boards, and more. But many of these resources are limited and offered only on a first-come, first-served basis; they could be greatly expanded. And given that COVID-19 and other viral infections are still a significant threat, stadiums could also be practicing viral safety by improving indoor air quality and encouraging mask use, or at the very least creating masks-required sections that people can opt into.