Thursday, September 18, 2008

Dear Football Fans, Fuck You

Let's say you own 4 season tickets on the 50 yard line for the Jets. To get the season tickets you have to buy tickets to 10 games, 2 of which are preseason games. In 2008, each of those seats costs $90, so for your season tickets you will pay $900 times 4 seats, which is $3600.

In 2010, when the new stadium opens, you will have to pay a Personal Seat License (PSL) fee of $25,000 per seat for the right to purchase your seat. Then the individual game tickets, instead of $90 each, will cost $700 each. So $700 times 10 games times 4 seats is $28,000. In 2010, therefore, your 4 season tickets will cost you $128,000. In 2011, and every year thereafter, they will cost you a mere $28,000.

Tickets for Giants games will be more expensive, but I don't know the exact numbers and my looking it up is really not necessary for my point to be made.

Who, pray tell, is going to pay over $100,000 for the right to watch the Jets? What I would do with that $128,000 is use it to open a sports bar and invite all the former season ticket holders to come and watch that game, along with every other game in the NFL on Sundays.

I know that a lot of research went into these pricing plans, but I'm seriously wondering who is going to buy these tickets. Even ticket scalpers wouldn't make a profit on those things.

4 comments:

Open Bar said...

One time, about four years ago, I went to Giants Stadium for a Giants game. It was nice.

The Notorious LJT said...

Huge corporations, like AIG.

Side Bar said...

I think you answered your own question at the end of your post when you wrote that "[e]ven ticket scalpers wouldn't make a profit on those things."

For years, a lot of sports tickets have been underpriced in comparison to what the market will bear (at least in New York). That is why Giants games sell out, Yankees games sell out, and even a number of Mets and Jets games sell out. To correct for the imperfect market, a secondary market sprung up - i.e., ticket scalpers. There are guys whose entire living is made off of buying tickets to the Yankees and Giants, and re-selling them for a profit. I think that the sports franchises finally decided it was stupid not to take advantage of people's willingness to pay a lot more for tickets. The price increase just reflects what the market will bear.

If there are 10,000 empty seats at Giants stadium next year, prices will come down. If there are still 100,000 people on the wait list to buy tickets, we can expect prices to continue to increase.

Anonymous said...

And I'm sure a lot of heavy-duty research went into determining the prices of these tickets beforehand, so that the Jets avoid the disasterous scenario that Side Bar mentioned (10,000 empty seats, having to reduce prices). I'm sure they know that there won't be a big dropoff, or at least they think so.

In related news, the Giants might be pretty good again this year.