Arena Brief

In the heart of Brooklyn, Barclays Center (barclayscenter.com) offers 17,732 seats for basketball, up to 19,000 seats for concerts, and has 101 luxury suites, plus an array of bars, lounges and clubs including Crown Club, 40/40 CLUB, and Qatar Airways Club.

Will you provide an overview of Barclays Center?

Barclays Center opened on September 28, 2012, and is a leading sports and entertainment venue located in the heart of Brooklyn, New York at the crossroads of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues. Designed by the award-winning architectural firms AECOM and SHoP Architects, Barclays Center is the state-of-the-art home of the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets and the WNBA’s New York Liberty, and hosts a diverse portfolio of events spanning professional and college sports, family entertainment, and concerts highlighting global superstars and emerging artists. Our venue has one of the most intimate seating configurations ever designed into a modern multi-purpose arena, with unparalleled sight lines and first-class amenities.

Barclays Center opened to extensive critical acclaim and was recognized with several major awards, including the 2012 Pollstar Award Best New Major Concert Venue, 2013 Sports Business Awards Facility of the Year, Architizer A+ Building of the Year Award, and the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce Brooklyn Building Award for Economic Development. Since opening with eight consecutive sold-out shows by JAY Z, we’ve continued to host the world’s most renowned performers, including Barbra Streisand, The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Elton John, Beyonce, Rihanna, Madonna, and Bruce Springsteen. The success of these events has made Barclays Center one of the most popular arenas in the world, ranked as a top venue of the 2010s decade by Billboard and Venues Now.

Will you highlight Barclays Center’s strength in offering leading sports events, concerts, and shows?

With a population of more than 2.6 million people, Brooklyn would be the fourth largest city in the United States, and Barclays Center is located atop one of the largest transportation hubs in New York City. The arena is accessible by 11 subway lines, the Long Island Railroad, and 11 bus lines, and the ease of access helps draw fans throughout the tri-state area and internationally for our major events.

As Brooklyn’s only large-scale entertainment arena, Barclays Center has established itself as an industry leader in sports and entertainment. We’ve welcomed nearly 17 million guests, bringing more than 500 of the world’s greatest international and national performers to the borough, and hosting more than 2,000 major events such as two MTV Video Music Awards, five Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremonies, 2015 NBA All-Star weekend, ten NBA Drafts, and special New Year’s Eve shows. After only seven years of operation, Barclays Center was named a top five venue of the decade by Billboard Magazine, and we are just getting started.

Barclays Center is committed to creating special memories for our guests and for our artists. We take pride in our efforts to make the arena feel warm and welcoming for our performers and their teams. We differentiate ourselves from other venues by presenting each performer with a personalized gift that is uniquely meaningful to them. For example, a crystal basketball created by Victor Solomon for Drake that featured his OVO logo, a one-of-a-kind necklace for Doja Cat from one of her favorite jewelry designers, a hand-embroidered jacket for members of Blink-182 who then wore it on stage, and more. We want our artists to feel equally excited about the Barclays Center experience as do our fans and our staff.

How has Barclays Center approached its food and beverage offerings?

Since Barclays Center opened its doors, it has become one of the world’s busiest sports and entertainment venues. Aside from providing world-class entertainment to our millions of fans and visitors, we have also become a premier food and beverage destination. Brooklyn is a true melting pot, with more than 150 nationalities represented across the borough, and Barclays Center seeks to reflect that diversity and bring authentic neighborhood staples into the arena through our Brooklyn Taste program.

We showcase everything from traditional Brooklyn favorites like Nathan’s hot dogs and Junior’s Cheesecakes, to multicultural flavors including birria tacos, handmade dumplings, and a white cheddar brat. We provide restaurants with an opportunity to share their specialties with guests at Barclays Center, but more importantly, we are committed to working with local businesses and suppliers, and to recruiting, training, and integrating community-based operators and suppliers into the venue’s concessions offerings. Our Brooklyn Market features vibrant and culturally relevant cuisine from a rotating group of local and minority-owned restaurants. Brooklyn Market is part of our commitment to support local businesses and provide opportunities within the BIPOC hospitality community to showcase and celebrate the diversity of Brooklyn’s culinary options.

In 2021, we opened our most exclusive club and premier dining experience in the arena, Crown Club. This premium courtside lounge was designed in partnership with Major Food Group and interior designer Ken Fulk and is located just steps from the basketball court and easily accessible from the best seats in the house. We believe Crown Club is redefining how the sports and entertainment industry approaches courtside clubs as a whole.

Will you discuss Barclays Center’s focus on technology and how this has enhanced the guest experience?

Fans expect a tech-enabled experience when they come to Barclays Center and staying ahead of tech trends is what helps differentiate events at our arena. We are consistently looking for ways to leverage technology to not only enhance the overall guest experience, but to also foster lasting moments that may be shared across social media and other digital channels.

Barclays Center features more than 8,000 square feet of LED signage, including a three-story tall, 70,000-pound 1080p center-hung scoreboard that features four high-definition LED displays. Additionally, hanging above the main entrance to Barclays Center is the Oculus, a 117-by-56-foot 360-degree LED marquee that extends over a 5,660-square-foot section of the arena’s main plaza. We’ve also implemented a digital video and content distribution platform that centrally controls and delivers targeted high-definition video and relevant digital content to guests. This platform powers 700 HDTV’s and approximately 100 concession menu boards throughout our arena, providing fans with an all-encompassing multimedia experience ranging from action on the court, to concession specials (all boards update simultaneously and are integrated with point of sale), to out-of-town games and scores, and even traffic updates.

We’ve also utilized tech enhancements to increase fan engagement during Nets and Liberty home games at Barclays Center, including integrating Snapchat AR and livestream tech into our video board, incorporating concert-level lighting through key moments during games, syncing opening videos with flashes and strobe lights in the crowd to create an immersive in-arena experience, and more.

We consistently update our technical infrastructure throughout the arena, recently upgrading to Wi-Fi 6 for a more seamless experience for our fans and customers, and we’ve installed displays with estimated entry wait times on screens at our arena’s entrances ensuring our guests know what to expect when they arrive at an event. We also offer in-seat ordering in various seat locations, providing fans with the ability to order concessions directly from their smartphones.

How is Barclays Center leading in sustainability, and will you highlight its sustainability initiatives?

Barclays Center is committed to reducing our environmental impact and we do so by instituting forward-thinking sustainability policies and continuing our ongoing efforts to save energy and water, recycle, purchase environmentally preferable products, and help raise awareness of environmental issues.

A model for sustainable design and construction, Barclays Center earned LEED© Silver Certification for New Construction from the U.S. Green Building Congress, becoming the first professional sports and entertainment venue in the New York metro area to achieve this status. Since receiving Silver LEED, we have continued to expand our sustainability efforts and in 2016, completed the installation of the 135,000-square-foot green roof – the largest-ever green roof to cover a sporting venue. The green roof reduces the amount of storm water runoff from the building by around two million gallons annually and minimizes the roof’s reflected heat.

We’ve also teamed up with Recycle Track Systems (RTS) and use composting and single-stream recycling solutions throughout the arena, diverting more than 1,000 tons of waste from landfills annually. Additionally, in 2018 we eliminated single-use plastic straws at all events, becoming the first sports and entertainment venue in the New York area to make such a commitment, and our current culinary paper products are all compostable. We’ve reduced electricity usage by installing thousands of LED lights throughout our concourse areas and use a “demand response program” to lower various lighting and cooling systems when the building isn’t being used to balance out the higher usage on others.

Will you discuss Barclays Center’s investment in training its workforce?

Arena customer service is a signature component of Barclays Center, and we want to ensure all guests coming through our doors are treated with the utmost respect and have their personal needs met. To achieve that goal, our arena’s more than 2,000 employees are trained on such topics as emergency preparedness, culture and value alignment, MOAB Training (Managing Violent and Aggressive Behavior) and general building awareness. In addition, we have worked with the Disney Institute, the business advisory arm of The Walt Disney Company, to support our core guest experience practices. This comprehensive approach ensures we consistently deliver on our promise to create amazing experiences where culture, community and entertainment intersect in a memorable way.

Additionally, as a sensory-certified arena, we are committed to providing an accessible experience for all our guests. Through our partnership with KultureCity, we have hosted integrated special trainings for our arena team members which included instruction on how to recognize sensory needs and ways to best communicate with guests who have those needs. Barclays Center also provides wheelchair and companion seating with appropriate sight lines on all levels and our team members are properly trained to guide guests with mobility challenges to their seating location and to other amenities.

The customer experiences truly differentiate us in the marketplace and give people a reason to keep coming back to Barclays Center. We are constantly looking to enhance our customer service with updated employee trainings and new ways to better engage our customers.

How important is it for Barclays Center to build a diverse and inclusive workforce?

Barclays Center employs about 2,000 staff members from the surrounding community who serve in a variety of functions across the venue, and it’s extremely important we maintain a diverse workforce – that means all races, religions, sexual orientations, disabilities, and ethnicities – in all roles across the organization. Brooklyn is a true melting pot and ensuring our workforce reflects the same diversity found in the borough helps us better understand and cater to all guests that enter our arena. Not only do we ensure our workforce is diverse, but as part of our company’s broader business diversity efforts, we created a Supplier Diversity Program that provides minority-owned, woman-owned and other diverse business enterprises (M/WBEs) with the opportunity to become suppliers of goods and services for Barclays Center, as well as the teams that play here.

What do you see as Barclays Center’s responsibility to be engaged in the Brooklyn community?

Barclays Center takes seriously our commitment to giving back to our community and we strive to positively impact the Brooklyn population through various initiatives and programs focusing on Education, Basketball and Community Investment. Working closely with our parent company BSE Global, the Brooklyn Nets and the New York Liberty, we partner with dozens of community groups each year to host education events, youth basketball clinics, Season of Giving activations, local art installations and more. We also donate thousands of tickets to community groups each year, giving those in underserved communities the opportunity to enjoy arena events that they may otherwise not be able to attend. Additionally, each year our office closes for a day and our more than 2,000 employees spend that time volunteering with different community organizations throughout the borough.

What are your priorities for Barclays Center as you look to the future?

Barclays Center strives each day to innovate our offerings and create meaningful and long-lasting memories for our fans, customers, performers, vendors, and staff. As the borough of Brooklyn continues to evolve, so do we – ensuring that we continue to serve as the premier destination and cultural touchpoint for Brooklyn and beyond. We are truly excited for the next decade and can’t wait to share our exciting experiences with the world.