Economy of sports tickets
If new stadiums are ever built for the San Francisco 49ers or
the Oakland Athletics, let’s hope the York’s and the Wolff’s keep
the PSLs to themselves.
Last week, the New York Times broke down some of the figures for
the brand-spankin’ new stadium the New York football Giants and
Jets will begin playing in for the 2010 season. Same stadium, mind
you, but the two teams will have differing ticket prices in an
effort to find out who’s loved less in the Big Apple.
And with the Giants fresh of a Super Bowl win, and with the Jets
reeling in one Brett Favre, what better time to take advantage of
your fans?
Economy of sports tickets
If new stadiums are ever built for the San Francisco 49ers or the Oakland Athletics, let’s hope the York’s and the Wolff’s keep the PSLs to themselves.
Last week, the New York Times broke down some of the figures for the brand-spankin’ new stadium the New York football Giants and Jets will begin playing in for the 2010 season. Same stadium, mind you, but the two teams will have differing ticket prices in an effort to find out who’s loved less in the Big Apple.
And with the Giants fresh of a Super Bowl win, and with the Jets reeling in one Brett Favre, what better time to take advantage of your fans?
The two teams will apparently have personal seat licenses, or as the kids call them, PSLs. Since the mid-90s, PSLs have been contributing to the growing relationship between stadiums and highway robbery, where teams continue to up ticket prices, weed out Joe Fan while bringing in Corporation X (which sounds like a good band name) and its bottomless pockets of tax-deductible dollars.
If you’re unfamiliar with PSLs, they’re basically your ticket to buying a ticket. The Times said the Giants are preparing to charge their fans a one-time fee, anywhere from $1,000 to $20,000 for a PSL, which only gives you the right to then purchase season tickets – and we all know those are about as much as a mortgage.
From a team’s perspective, the PSL gives the fan a sense of ownership (Great, thanks!), while also offsetting the cost of the stadium, which, in the Giants and Jets’ case, carries a $1.6 billion price tag.
It also can be taken as an investment, where fans can re-sell the PSL to someone else. If the PSL is purchased but season tickets aren’t, though, then the team takes the PSL back, free of charge.
So, how much do you love your team? And by love, I mean how much are you willing to fork over.
While on vacation recently, I shelled out more than $300 for two tickets to see the Boston Red Sox battle the below .500 Texas Rangers on a Wednesday night, and all I got was this cynical column.
I had to buy the tickets through a third-party distributor online, which is only adding to the problem of high ticket prices because it simply drives them up even further. I apologize for this.
Considering ticket prices are posted on the Web, and considering teams monitor their stadium’s attendance, a sell out shows fans either paid the $50 retail value, or, in my case, the $300 that was posted online.
If fans – and I’m not the only one – are willing to pay $300 for two tickets to a game, why not just charge that up front and cut out the middle man? It’s simple business economics.
Another problem that I’ve already mentioned are the corporate dollars. Businesses can afford high ticket prices because they can write off up to 50 percent of their entertainment expenses at the end of the day. If you’re a team owner, and you can sell $25 tickets or $75 tickets, knowing full well they will both sell, which one will you choose?
Take away that entertainment expense for businesses, though, and it’d be hard to justify season tickets, let alone a PSL, to the shareholders.
As we stand right now, teams increase prices every year, searching for that high-price ceiling where fans eventually stop paying and stop coming. For the Red Sox, the team with the highest prices in the Majors, it has been another sell-out season, so expect tickets to go up again next year.
But does anything have a ceiling? If PSLs continue to rise, and ticket prices continue to go up, where does it end? And, as Jets fan Barry Javeline put it, why are we paying for the right to keep a seat we already pay for?
Both the San Francisco baseball Giants and the Oakland Raiders have used some form of PSLs in recent years – the Giants used them to help pay for the costs of SBC Park, and charged fans a reported $1,500 to $7,500 per license.
But New York’s trend to up the ante – as well as the Dallas Cowboys, which are said to be charging $150,000 for elite club seats, according to the Times –shows a disheartening and expensive trend that, like ticket prices and $8 beers, appears to be rising with no end in sight.
