Bill Plaschke of the Los Angeles Times has a first-person report on buying Dodgers tickets for $2.55 each and going to a half-empty game at Dodger Stadium, which gets you scenes like this:
There were no lines to enter the parking lot, no lines to enter the stadium, and nobody clogging the concourses as we walked to our seats just in time to watch the first of many lousy pitches from Chad Billingsley.
Actually, I don’t think those were our seats. Because our section was virtually empty, we could pick any seat we wanted, so we pulled into a middle row and spread out like three people sitting in an empty theater before a bad movie.
We put our feet up on the seat in front of us. We spread our arms across the seats between us. There were no heads to block our view. There was little sound to distract our attention. Down below, the Dodgers and Reds battled each other as if they were Little Leaguers playing for a handful of parents.
It was actually pretty cool. Life in Frank McCourt’s Ghost Town is eerie, but it has its advantages.
Plaschke’s column is mostly a good reminder that official sales figures don’t reflect either actual attendance or actual ticket prices, especially in the age of StubHub. I know I went to a New York Red Bulls game a few weeks back, and sat in what were technically $20 seats, but paid only $5 apiece through a discount program the team runs for my son’s AYSO soccer league; and while press reports had it a virtual sellout of the 20,000 seat stadium, there’s no way more than 5,000 people were there. (Not that this made it any easier to get in and out of the parking lot.)
We are badly in need of legit attendance figures, especially when cities are basing subsidies on the amount of foot traffic a team is expected to generate — but unless the sports leagues see that as in their best interests, or we get an iPhone app that estimates attendance and lets us crowd-source this, don’t hold your breath.
Any idea when they switched from “actual attendance”
to “tickets sold” ? I’m pretty sure that a lot of teams used actual attendance in the 1960’s and 70’s.
The AL has always reported tickets sold, but the NL reported turnstile count (i.e., actual attendance) until 1992, when the two leagues consolidated business operations. See:
www.latimes.com/la-sp-attendance-082305,0,2392256.story
Yeah, let’s all just throw caution to the wind and stop scrutinizing our proposed business partners. If our “partner” wants us to build a $387M building and then give them great lease terms that can threaten the health of our general funds, it’s best to not ask our partners too many questions about their own fiscal health. Lose 98% of your main investment? Irrelevant. Don’t want to become a cowtown, right?
Of course not!
www.sacbee.com/2011/06/18/3709756/maloofs-will-own-just-2-of-palms.html
Problem in Sac is for once a city has really been painted into a corner. They have to make a decision what is more important to the city, keeping the team by building a risky potentially money losing arena or building a well thought out and fiscally positive arena and losing the team. The Kings are gone come March 1 if they go the latter route. Unlike the NFL where “LA” has been a threatening buzz word to drive stadium development for the last 15 years with no real teeth since LA doesn’t have an NFL ready stadium, the Kings really will be in Anaheim come the 2012 opening day if they don’t act quickly in Sac. It was a minor miracle they didn’t already move down for the coming season. Anaheim has a better arena, more people, more money, and a future owner the NBA wouldn’t mind having replace the bumbling Maloof brothers in the lodge.
Well, Dan, that’s why I’ve done my best to become cold and emotionless about this. Local governments can boil this down to 2-3 questions:
1) Does some given proposal pencil?
2) Does it put the general fund at risk?
That’s about it, really.
Some cities may decide it’s worth it to spend money out of the general fund to retain teams. In those cases, I believe it’s necessary to ask the voters, and then respect their decision. If they say no, stop asking. If they say no by an 80-20 margin, the relevant politicians need to stop talking about it entirely, unless it’s to say, “The voters spoke loud and clear, and we respect their decision. Let’s talk about our parks budget now.”
Dan, I’m also hoping for a lockout.
But what really bothers me about this whole thing is the lie we’ve been told since 1997, about who really owns Power Balance; it’s the City.
So why would the Maloofs want to lease two arenas from the City?
They just don’t have the $70M or so to pay off the current bonds, and the City doesn’t either. So I guess that $70M just gets added to whatever bonds they decide to sell for this new arena. All of a sudden, we’re up to $450M, before parking garages, overruns and infrastructure. This will hit $600M, for sure.
A $30M+ annual bond payment to generate $5M in tax revenues. Can’t we just stop now?
If they don’t want a team by all means stop now. But it seems to me that they want a team both the citizens and the government, particularly after the close call this spring. The real question is can they get it done in time. I don’t think cost is really the issue in their minds as much but putting a package together in time. A lockout would probably ensure that the Kings are gone from Sac and as the fevered support the near miss generated would subside.
It’d be a shame if timing overrides fiscal soundness, but in CA, it will be hard to implement a rental car tax hike without a vote. Plus, the jpa approach seems to have too little support.
Sounds like it’ll be too little, too late to me; I give it less than a 1 in 4 shot…
Neil:
It’s a problem in lots of areas and lots of sports. I’ve seen ‘announced sellouts’ in facilities that were barely half full.
And you have moronic organizations like the NHL, which allows it’s owners to buy their own tickets (until this year it didn’t even have to be at face value) just to meet the attendance requirement for revenue sharing…
Despite what team owners and league commissioners like to say, the market for tickets to sporting events across the board is actually dropping. It will be very interesting to see the landscape of professional sports in 20 years.
JB:
You are indeed correct about dropping attendance rates. For the number of times I’ve gotten cheap tickets to an Oilers game for a fraction of the regular price it’s hard to imagine that in five years there won’t be a tidal wave of season ticket cancellations to the point that the existing waiting lists will be depleted. Once that happens and people approach going to a game like going to a movie – I’ll buy a ticket a few hours before game time if I still feel like it – ticket prices are going to crash across the board to catch up with falling demand.
Legalized ticket scalping sites will cannibalize pro-sports ticket prices very soon if it hasn’t already.
I read something on the NFL CBA and in the report it said the league figures they’ll be making $18B yearly by 2025. Unless TV rights continue to hold value or go up (which could still happen) not with this aging population.
It’s going to be an interesting decade of sports.
I think Andrew T is on to something, but I also think pro sports orgs are responding in the right way. In the NBA and NHL season tickets are hot in part because teams are offering 20-40% discounts off the list price and allowing resales through their website and Ticketmaster. It still stinks when the team is bad (for example, 30-35 of the Bucks’ 41 home games last year could be had on Stubhub for below what I paid as a STH), but at least you get seats you like, a guaranteed face value ticket for the playoffs and a nice price if the team has a good year.
Ben:
I have no clue what season ticket holders get in other markets or in other eras but it seems like what you mentioned is the same as what one gets for being a season ticket holder here for the Edmonton Oilers. So I’m not 100% sure that they’re offering added incentives or whether they are just offering what they always have.
Either way, I’ll be curious to see if the incentives teams offer for STH grows in the coming years or whether it stays about the same. Just like when a city’s rental market sees an increasing number of “Free Rent” signs its a sure sign that the rental market is growing soft, if a similar thing happens in pro-sports it’ll be a sure sign that the ticket market is growing soft.