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WHAT STAFF YOU NEED FOR LARGE-SCALE SPORTS EVENTS IN LOS ANGELES (MOTOGP EXAMPLE)
Updated: Sep 12
A few months ago, I attended the MotoGP Grand Prix in Austin. I spent four days between a private Ducati dinner celebrating 100 years of the brand and three full days at Circuit of the Americas, a massive motorsports and entertainment venue that becomes its own little city during race weekend.
As the owner of an event staffing agency, I obviously was not looking only at the motorcycles, I was also watching the staff.
There were merchandise teams positioned near the entrances, hostesses inside branded pavilions, promotional staff moving through the crowds, people checking credentials at paddock entrances, and bartenders and servers working inside VIP hospitality areas.
From a guest’s perspective, MotoGP feels like one enormous event. From a staffing perspective, it is anything but.
Once I started paying attention to how everything was divided, I realized that what looked like one sports event was actually five or six completely different operations happening at the same time.
And this is probably the most important thing to understand when planning staff for a large sports event in Los Angeles. You are not staffing one event - you are staffing several environments that happen to be connected to the same event.
LOS ANGELES SPORTS EVENTS ARE STAFFED LAYERED — NOT CENTRALIZED
At MotoGP, you could walk for ten minutes and move through completely different staffing environments.
Near the main entrances, the focus was merchandise, guest information, and crowd movement. Around the branded pavilions, promotional teams were engaging fans and representing sponsors. Paddock and garage areas had controlled access. VIP hospitality had its own bartenders, servers, bussers, and food service teams.
Every area had a different purpose, and therefore needed different people.
The same principle applies when planning a large-scale sports event in Los Angeles, whether you are working inside a stadium, producing a sponsor activation nearby, operating a fan experience, or hosting VIP guests at a completely separate location.
This is why you would not start planning with: “How many event staff do we need?” You would start with:
What areas are we operating?
What is happening in each one?
Where are the busiest points?
Which positions are guest-facing?
Which areas need specialized hospitality or promotional experience?
And only then we would start putting numbers next to each team.
Forty people spread across six different operations are not really one team of forty. They are six smaller teams that need to function independently while still being connected to the larger event.
THE REAL ENGINE BEHIND: PROMOTIONAL STAFF AND BRAND AMBASSADORS ARE EVERYWHERE FOR A REASON
One of the most noticeable staffing layers at MotoGP was marketing.
Brands were everywhere, and they were obviously competing for the same thing: people’s attention.
There were traditional branded pavilions, merchandise areas, promotional teams moving through crowds, hostesses representing specific brands, and street marketing happening beyond the official activations.
What I found interesting was how different those promotional roles could be.
Some staff needed to actively approach people and start conversations. Others were positioned inside a pavilion where guests were already coming to them. Some roles were highly visual and connected to the design of the activation itself.
At the Ducati pavilion, for example, the hostesses were styled specifically for the brand. Around the racers’ garages, umbrella promo girls were wearing coordinated Elizabetta Franchi branded looks that became part of the visual experience around the teams.
That does not mean every sports activation needs models standing around looking pretty.
Quite the opposite.
If someone is representing a product or sponsor activation where guests are asking questions, that person needs to know what they are talking about. If the objective is lead generation, they need to be comfortable starting conversations and collecting information. If they are distributing something through a crowded fan zone, they need the energy to stay active for hours.
But there are also sports activations where appearance and styling genuinely are part of the job.
The role has to follow the activation.
At large sports event, people are part of the design, but they also have to do something useful once people notice them.
MERCHANDISE IS ITS OWN OPERATION
I did not expect merchandise staffing to be one of the things I paid attention to at MotoGP, but it was. There were major merchandise areas positioned close enough to the main traffic routes to capture people coming through the venue, while still being separated enough that everyone was not being pushed toward one location.
And when thousands of people suddenly decide they want a shirt, hat, or piece of race merchandise, the problem is no longer simply having somebody behind a counter.
You have lines, payments, people asking for sizes, inventory disappearing, guests trying to walk through the same area where other guests have stopped to shop.
For a major sports event in Los Angeles, merchandise sales should be treated as their own staffing operation rather than another task to hand to whatever event staff happen to be nearby.
The people working it need to understand customer interaction and fast transactions, but the physical setup matters too. Where does the line form? Who keeps it from blocking a walkway? Who restocks? What happens during the major rush before the event starts or immediately afterward?
A merchandise booth with five customers and the same booth with fifty customers are two very different jobs.
ACCESS AND CROWD CONTROL: IS NOT JUST SOMEONE STANDING AT A DOOR
Once we moved beyond the public areas at MotoGP, another staffing layer became very obvious: access control. Paddocks and garages were restricted, and credentials were checked repeatedly.
At many entry points, I saw two to four staff members checking or scanning access as guests entered and exited. Inside VIP paddock areas, credential verification became even more layered because different guests had access to different MotoGP days.
And that makes sense. If somebody paid for a particular day to access VIP lounge, the organizer cannot have one badge circulating between five people.
For large sports events, check-in and access staff may be responsible for badge distribution, credential verification, QR code scanning, directing guests to the correct entrance, and explaining why someone’s credential gets them through one door but not another.
This is also where I think people sometimes underestimate directional staff.
Put several thousand people into an unfamiliar venue with different entrances, security zones, hospitality areas, restrooms, transportation points, and restricted sections, and suddenly the person saying, “Your entrance is actually around the corner,” becomes pretty important.
The larger the venue becomes, the more small guest-flow problems turn into large ones.
VIP HOSPITALITY: A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT STANDARD
Then you walk into VIP lounge and hospitality, and the staffing changes again.
At MotoGP, the VIP area included multiple food service areas across several floors, buffet stations, branded bars with predetermined cocktail menus, dessert and ice cream stations, and staff constantly maintaining the spaces while guests moved between the hospitality areas and the track.
These guests had paid thousands of dollars for premium access, so naturally their expectations were different.
They were not going to walk past a dirty table five times and think, “Well, it is a busy race.”
This is where you need hospitality staff who understand the pace without requiring someone to explain every next step.
Bartenders need to know how to keep a high-volume bar moving. Servers need to see when tables need attention. Bussers need to reset constantly rather than waiting until half the room is covered in used glassware.
And the staffing plan has to account for how people actually behave.
Guests may disappear to watch part of the race and then return to hospitality at the same time. A bar that looked perfectly manageable twenty minutes ago can suddenly have a line. A buffet can go from quiet to crowded because something happening elsewhere in the venue just ended.
Sports hospitality has peaks so the wait and bar teams need to be able to move with them.
IN LOS ANGELES, THE STAFFING PLAN STARTS BEFORE ANYONE REACHES THE EVENT
Los Angeles adds another problem to large sports events: getting everyone there on time.
You can build the perfect staffing schedule and then discover that staff parking is a twenty-minute walk from the actual activation, road closures have changed access to the venue, or your 6 pm call time requires people to arrive much earlier than anyone anticipated.
Los Angeles traffic becomes less cooperative when you are producing an important event. For large stadium events, you would want to know where staff are parking, which entrance they are using, whether credentials are required before they can access their work area, how long it realistically takes to get from parking to check-in, and who is meeting the team when they arrive.
The 405 does not care about your production schedule.
Call times, parking, transportation, credential pickup, and venue access are all part of staffing because none of the positions you planned matter very much if the people assigned to them cannot get where they are supposed to be on time.
LASTLY: YOU’RE NOT LOOKING FOR EVENT STAFF IN LA—YOU’RE BUILDING A SYSTEM
The biggest thing I took away from MotoGP was how many people were working there - there were a lot of people! It was a massive international sporting event.
But what interested me was also how clearly the staffing changed from one environment to another.
The person representing a brand inside a pavilion had a completely different job from the person checking paddock credentials a few hundred feet away. The bartender inside VIP hospitality was solving a different problem from the merchandise team near the entrance.
Yet all of those people contributed to the same guest experience.
We have seen the operational side of this ourselves while staffing events around Formula 1 in Las Vegas, where private hospitality, bars, guest-facing service, and event support can all have completely different staffing needs even though everyone is there because of the same race weekend.
That is why, when we plan large-scale sports event staffing in Los Angeles, we do not start by filling a spreadsheet with names.
We start by looking at what is actually happening.
Where do people need to be? What are they responsible for? Which teams need their own leaders? Where are the pressure points? What happens when the crowd moves from one area to another? And where do we need enough flexibility to deal with something that was not in the original plan?
Because once an event reaches this size, staffing is no longer simply about putting people into positions.
It becomes part of the infrastructure, and it needs to be planned like one.
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