“If ever you had any doubt that there are two Americas, the one that can afford to go to games and the other, larger one that can only sit home and watch, doubt no more,” Wallace Matthews writes in today’s Newsday. This in response to news that an online auction for personal seat licenses for the new New York Jets stadium have sold for as much as $65,100 – more than triple the top PSL price for the Super Bowl champion Giants in the same stadium. And that’s before the $700 per ticket those fans will have to pay to attend each Jets game.
Like the Wall Street bailout, fans can conceivably make some of their PSL purchase price back, by selling their licenses to other fans once they can no longer stomach watching the Jets play. Still, you’d have thought that with many people’s life savings disintegrating faster than Iceland’s, fans would be loath to plunk down what’s left on a gamble that premium Jets tickets will appreciate in value. Apparently, you’d have thought wrong.
Back to Matthews:
Until this week, I had held out hope that, prompted by the economic slowdown, some form of sanity might return to pro sports in this town, that maybe the Jets’ auction would attract nothing but minimum bids, that the Yankees would find themselves stuck with a bunch of unsold luxury boxes and that the Mets would relent on their “season-tickets only” policy at Citi Field to reach out to their partial-plan holders, who as of now are shut out of the new park.
I thought they might do that not out of the goodness of their hearts but through necessity and the harsh reality of an economy that no longer has the kind of mad money I thought these teams were crazy to demand.
Turns out the crazy one was me.