In-seat ordering makes you miss the goal you paid for

Stadium apps solved the queue by moving the distraction from the concourse into your seat, which is worse.

Order at your seat, we will bring it to you, never miss a moment. That is the promise on the splash screen of roughly every stadium app built in the last five years, and it is close to the opposite of what happens.

Here is the sequence. You open the app in the twenty-eighth minute. Signal in a bowl of sixty thousand phones is poor, so the menu takes a while. You choose. Payment fails once. You retry. Now you have a live order and a runner who cannot find row K, so you are watching the aisle instead of the pitch, and when the noise goes up you are looking at the wrong thing. The concourse queue at least had the decency to happen at half time.

The people who build these things measure the wrong outcome. Their success metric is spend per head, and spend per head genuinely rises, because an app makes a second drink frictionless in a way that a twelve minute queue never did. Nobody is measuring attention lost per transaction. If they did, they would find that the app converts a small number of concentrated absences into a large number of scattered ones, spread across the exact minutes when something might happen.

I am not arguing for the queue. The queue was miserable and it is why half time exists as a commercial event at all. I am arguing that the design goal was set wrong. Fix the pickup, not the ordering. Collection windows tied to stoppages, lockers at the end of the row, a code that turns green when the ball goes out. Anything that puts the interruption where the game already paused itself.

There is a harder version of the argument. A stadium app is a retail channel that happens to sit inside a sporting event, and retail channels are built to maximise sessions. Sessions are the enemy of a live crowd. The clubs that have understood this tend to be the ones with a strong singing section, because they can see the damage directly. A stand where everyone is heads-down at twenty to four does not make noise, and noise is the product the broadcaster is buying.

Build the app. Just stop congratulating yourself every time somebody opens it.