This week’s New Yorker has an article by John Seabrook on the question of whether modern stadium design is ruining the sports-watching experience by catering to rich folks, which because this is the New Yorker is so long that it took me two days to get around to finishing reading it. Also because it’s the New Yorker it’s filled with prose right on the knife’s edge between beautifully crafted and ponderously overwritten (“The suite levels are layered throughout the lower bowl like the buttercream filling in a Dobos torte, forming an inverted cone of the strata of American affluence”) and features a mid-article flashback to the origin of stadiums during Roman times, which helps with hitting that incredibly long word count.
But what does it actually have to teach us about whether luxury boxes have made the sports viewing experience suck? Let’s check in on the highlights and see:
The Houston Astrodome was “the first stadium to have luxury ‘skyboxes,’” which turned “the least desirable seats into the most expensive and coveted spots in the house,” and which New Yorker writer Roger Angell at the time called “immensely glum—sad, soft caves for indoor sportsmen.”
True! It was a long road from the nosebleed-seat skyboxes of the Astrodome to the premium-placed luxury suites of today, but that’s indeed the origin story.
Club seats, which offer cushier amenities but are out in the regular seating bowl, are more expensive than regular seats, and seats in luxury boxes are more expensive than either.
Again, checks out. And this is all part of the plan to capture the most possible revenue under each slice of the demand curve: Lance Evans, the lead architect for the Los Angeles Rams‘ new SoFi Stadium (the building with the Dobos torte of layered experiences), remarks to Seabrook that “every step along an individual’s journey through life they have an opportunity to create an experience that aligns with their place in the world. As they get their first promotion, there’s a spot in the stadium for them to celebrate. When they become a partner in a law firm, there’s a place for them, and as they become C.E.O.s there’s a place, too.” (Architecture schools should probably offer more required courses in irony.)
At SoFi, a club seat can cost as much as two thousand dollars a game, and a suite can go as high as fifty thousand dollars a game.
Does this make the regular seats more expensive and/or worse, though? The obvious answer is hell yeah, since the more grandstand space is dedicated to luxury options, the less room there is for regular seating; and, as this site has been harping on since the very beginning, the more space-gobbling suites you wedge in below the upper deck, the more the cheap seats have to be relocated farther from the field both vertically and horizontally. The reason the front row of the upper deck at the Chicago White Sox‘ current stadium is farther from the field from the back row of old Comiskey Park isn’t because the architects were idiots; it’s because they had to make space for a whole bunch of glassed-in living rooms between you and the field.
“N.F.L. owners don’t have to share certain types of premium revenue if they use the money to pay down any debt incurred in financing the stadium. Income from naming rights can also be used to pay off construction costs.” Since other revenue has to be shared with players, “Essentially, players are helping to cover the costs of building these mega-stadiums.”
Yes, ever since the NFL instituted its G-3 program (since replaced by G-4 and G-5) that lets team owners pay off some stadium construction costs with money that would otherwise have to be shared with the rest of the league, and the players. Seabrook doesn’t get into it, but G-3 was first put in place back in 1999 when the NFL was alarmed that teams like the New England Patriots were threatening to move to smaller cities like Hartford to get better stadium deals, and the league didn’t want to risk losing TV money as a result. The NFL owners appointed a committee to come up with a solution, and the head of the committee was Patriots owner Robert Kraft, and you can probably guess how things went from there.
“Suites are for corporate schmoozing and sips and bites, not bonkers fandom. Money prefers quiet; it’s more civilized.”
Sure, but again, how does that impact the folks in the non-suite seats? Seabrook, at SoFi to take in a Beyoncé concert from a suite as research (journalism does have its perks), notes that he “looked enviously at the concertgoers above me in the cheaper seats leaping up and down and dancing.” You could have been one of those concertgoers in the cheaper seats, John, if you’d been willing to pay for tickets yourself and put up with a more distant view and having to rub elbows with strangers instead of sitting on a sofa — but that’s the same reason anyone sits in luxury suites. The main advantage of “corporate schmoozing” is that somebody else is paying for it — the changing tax deductibility of sports tickets has also affected stadium design, another digression that might have been instructive here.
“Stadiums are secular megachurches, where believers gather to share communion, to exalt and mourn, and to don the vestments of faith.”
Live by New Yorkerese, die by New Yorkerese. Skipping ahead:
“In baseball stadiums, some tickets remained affordable, partly because the sport has so many games. At Yankee Stadium, for example, it’s still possible to snag a bleacher seat at a midweek game for less than thirty dollars. In most football stadiums, which in a given year host ten home games at best, twenty in SoFi’s case, limited demand has pushed prices up.”
Right — and this would be the case with or without luxury seating. Baseball’s 162-game schedule has, however, inspired lots of MLB owners to reduce capacity in new stadiums in order to create artificial ticket scarcity, allowing them to charge higher prices for fewer seats. (Luxury seating has an impact here as well: The ideal stadium, from an owner’s perspective, would probably be one incredibly luxurious seat that you could then sell to Martin Shkreli; barring that, dynamic pricing has been the next-best solution to separating the most people from the most money.)
“These days, there are nearly twenty-four million millionaires in the U.S. Roughly equivalent to the population of Florida, they constitute their own mass market. There are nine hundred and two billionaires—a number that has doubled in the past twelve years.”
And this, really, is the crux of the matter. Luxury suites and club seats aren’t an invention that stadium architects only just came up with over the last few decades; they’re a response to a change in the sports market, that change being that there are a hell of a lot more Americans for whom ticket prices are no object, thanks to Ronald Reagan, mostly. For NFL teams, who only have 500,000 tickets or so to sell per year, this has allowed owners to price all tickets at what only the filthy rich can afford (though some of the less rich end up finding ways), and even add personal seat license fees as well; for MLB, ticket inflation has been slightly slower, but team owners are still more concerned about marketing to those 24 million millionaires than to the other 300 million Americans.
Income inequality, new stadium design, and government tax policy are all working hand in hand to change sports into a more premium experience, which is maybe great if you can afford it — at least if you don’t feel constrained by all the corporate blandness like party poopers like Angell and Seabrook. But even if you do, there’s probably a spot somewhere in the layered torte for you, so long as you don’t mind feeling like a lowly person celebrating their first promotion. There’s probably a lesson here about the American dream as a whole, but even a New Yorker article is too short to contain it.
