When the New England Patriots blocked a field goal in this year’s AFC Championship game, putting the team on the cusp of a Super Bowl trip, Austin Sagan wasn’t cheering like his Patriots-obsessed dad.
He was thinking about gate constraints at Logan International Airport.
“My dad’s going crazy because the Patriots are scoring or something,” Austin Sagan said. “And I’m like, ‘oh, we gotta start getting the Boston flights ready.’”
Sagan has a gig that any sports nut would envy: He basically gets paid to watch games. Here’s the kicker: He’s not a sports nut.
The 29-year-old is a network planning analyst for American Airlines, and for the past year his specialty has been special events. Sometimes they’re predictable. The Kentucky Derby has come to Louisville on the first Saturday of May for nearly a century. Coachella is in the same valley every April.
Sometimes, they’re not. When Bad Bunny or Taylor Swift announce a tour, Sagan jumps into action, setting up American’s flying schedule to help fans get to shows. During single-elimination tournaments, he’s researching teams’ fans and tracking every game to ensure American has the right number of flights within minutes of the final buzzer.
“I’ve never watched more sports in my life than in the last year,” Sagan said.
Then there’s the World Cup: 48 nations playing 104 games across three countries.
A fan’s dream. An airline strategist’s quandary.
Sagan’s preparations started over a year ago. Typically, much of his work involves observing trends from previous tournaments and monitoring the action as rounds progress.
For this event there was no easy comparison. The last World Cup was in Qatar, making it the most territorially compact World Cup ever. Now it’s going to the other extreme, spanning Canada, Mexico and the U.S.
The closest proxy was FIFA’s Club World Cup held across 10 U.S. states last year, which provided a model for how soccer fans might move across North America this summer. Sagan and his team mapped out flight paths for placeholders, based on stadium locations and rough dates, long before the official drawing.
When FIFA held its final draw ceremony in December, dividing the 48-team field into 12 groups of four, it was crunch time. Sagan was glued to a group chat of revenue-management colleagues firing off messages in real-time to make surgical adjustments.
“It was something I wouldn’t have normally watched,” he said. “But based on all of the work that I put into it, I was very invested in figuring out, basically, did my forecast pan out?”
Sagan beefed up the L.A.-to-Seattle route to help followers of the U.S. team attend early-round group matches. For Scotland die-hards, he added capacity from their opening matches in the Boston area to Miami, where their final group match against Brazil is set. Japan’s fans are showing a high propensity for travel, so Sagan increased flights between their group-stage outings in Dallas and Monterrey, Mexico.
When the dust settled, the airline had added more than 28,000 domestic seats, and over 30,000 total when accounting for long-haul international flights. Once the games begin, Sagan will be watching for unexpected outcomes that might require a fresh look at the schedule, though he’s hesitant to bet on any upsets just yet.
He doesn’t exactly trust his instincts when it comes to sports.
“I grew up playing them, but have not always been the biggest fan of necessarily watching them,” he said. “It’s not intuitive for me.”
Sagan studied hotel administration at Cornell University and parlayed his hospitality background into network planning at American. Capacity optimization was his specialty. He worked to meet demand based on the day of the week, and then started planning around holidays. Special events was the logical, if not natural, next step.
He leans on colleagues who are more tuned-in to the intricacies of sports fandom, and isn’t above texting friends for insights on certain matchups or rivalries.
Sagan’s boss’ boss, Brian Znotins, saw during the last World Cup that Argentinians are the most likely to follow their team. So if Argentina looks poised for victory in a knockout round, Sagan and his team will be standing by with flights to the next game before the final whistle.
“We don’t know what we’re going to do until we get the information,” said Znotins, senior vice president of network and schedule planning. “But we just want to be ready to do it when we get it.”
Write to Dean Seal at dean.seal@wsj.com