Soccer Fans Use RFID Cards to Gain Admission and Buy Food

After several purchases—either in the stadium or at other city locations—have been made offline using the card's contactless capabilities, the system may advise the user to switch to a chip-and-PIN transaction, in which they must key in a PIN number to update the prepaid monetary value stored on the card before it can be used again contactlessly. This security measure helps ensure that cardholders do not overextend their prepaid limit.

Upon leaving the stadium, cardholders can continue to use the prepaid card to make purchases. However, Wray points out, there are few PayPass terminals in the city of Manchester at present. Until that changes, he says, the cards can be used as contact prepaid payment cards, with a PIN entered at the time of transaction.

Richard Wray

"It will be interesting to see whether members will use these cards outside of the stadium," Wray says. MasterCard and MBNA Europe hope the cards, with the cardholder's local team emblazoned on the front, will serve as a standard payment method outside of the club for many football fans.

Wray says he expects users to load about £100 (about $200) or more on the prepaid card, but that the pilot will reveal the true average. "This is a great model," Wray says, "We've put access control and a payment application in a single piece of plastic, all running off one chip." The cards conform to the Europay, MasterCard and Visa (EMV) specification, which enables the updating of their stored data whenever the cards are used in a chip-and-PIN reader. The EMV standard, Wray says, is also designed to allow multiple applications on a chip.

RFID-enabled stadium membership cards are already plentiful in Europe, Pinnick says, with 40 stadiums using the Fortress GB system to date. The Manchester pilot, he adds, is working very well technically. "Football fans are still entering the stadium the way they normally do," he says. "The next big wave in Europe is to switch on new applications," including the addition of payment functions.

If the pilot continues to go well technically, and if the payment portion of the card is also used successfully by pilot participants, Pinnick says Manchester City Football Club will deploy PayPass sales terminals throughout the entire stadium next season. "Every person who enters the stadium will have one of these (PayPass) cards," he says, "and the whole stadium can go cashless."