I meant to post about the concept of personal seat licenses – ransoms charged by teams for the right to attempt to get season tickets, especially in new stadiums – last week but I ran out of time. But it seems as though Zoneblitz isn’t the only football fan getting turned off by the degree to which this trend is pricing the average fan out of the game.
The most recent announcement – and the one that sent ZB over the edge – came from Dallas where Jerry Jones announced that fans would have to pay up to $150,000 for the right to purchase duckets for his billion dollar toy in Arlington.
Fox Sports rightly points out that this is on top of the $300 million in public financing the Cowboys received to construct what is supposed to be a wonder of an arena. Yes, $150,000 – not for the tickets, but for the right to have a chance to later buy the tickets.
Granted, those are for the elite club seats. But Sorry Jerry … even if I had $150,000 sitting around I wouldn’t be sending it to Dallas or any other city or team for the right to maybe get some tickets someday. It was vomitous, but perhaps defensible as the cost of doing business as a 21st century sports fan when teams were charging a few hundred, maybe even a thousand bucks or so to recoup some of their investment in building these stadiums. The Cowboys are hardly the first team to charge these ransoms for their tickets, and clearly fans are paying up.
But what does it say to the long-time, blue-collar fans that support teams by spending their increasingly decreasing amounts of disposable income – the ones who paint themselves in the team colors, buy and wear the garb, and generally act like goofballs to support their teams – that they are going to have to pay four, five, six, seven times their annual incomes just for the right to maybe buy tickets if they want to sit in decent seats?
John Mara, president and co-owner of the New York Giants, announced recently that his fans would have to cough up some dough as well. While the $1,000 to $20,000 he’s requiring ain’t cheap either, it’s more palatable than the joke of a price the Cowboys are charging.
The Giants are hoping to bring in between $300 million and $400 million – half of which goes to taxes, according to the New York Times story – from PSLs. $300 million to $400 million!!! In revenue not from ticket sales but from the right to buy tickets.
These things have been in the works for 15 years and something around a dozen NFL teams have used them. They’ve caught on in other sports and at the college level as well. At first it was an impressive way of finding revenue to offset the cost of buildings that are unbelievably expensive to build. But come on – the average fan has nowhere near the resources to cover these ridiculous costs. Do owners want their fans to support the local team? Or do they want to rob those fans blind?
Loading ...
Caveat emptor
If Jerry can get enough people to cough up that money and fill his stadium then more power to him. He may, however, want to ask Oakland how their PSL experience went.
I generally agree with your “more power to him” theory. But in Jones’ case I think he’s taken it too far. Six figures is just too much. It’s going from helping to pay for the venue to pure greed. Tickets are expensive enough as it is. I guess if he can get it then you are right. But I think at some point fans are going to say enough is enough and I hope this is the time.