The owners of the Minnesota Vikings have announced they’re 90% of the way toward selling out their stadium-builder licenses (i.e., PSLs) for their new stadium, having raised $115 million toward their $125 million goal as part of funding for their $1 billion stadium.
That’s good for them, but it points up how crazily unbalanced the PSL market is, with the Dallas Cowboys raising about $650 million, the San Francisco 49ers, New York Giants, and New York Jets a bit over $300 million apiece, and teams like the Vikings and Atlanta Falcons down in the $100 million range. That sort of explains why NFL teams are willing to pay $550 million to go to Los Angeles for its supposed PSL riches, though not really, since unless the Rams suddenly become as popular as the Cowboys they’re still only looking at maybe $250 million of added PSL sales, which according to my math is less than $550 million.
The other interesting bit is that, as has been the case with other PSL deals, the Vikings sold out the best seats and the cheapest ones first, and it’s the mid-priced ones that are the toughest sells. That could be a commentary on our increasingly economically polarized society, though it could also just mean that NFL teams are lousy at setting prices. Either way, if you have $2,000 burning a hole in your pocket and a desire to spend it on the right to buy football tickets (which will cost extra money to actually buy, of course), then Minnesota has a deal for you.
“…a desire to spend it on the right to buy football tickets (which will cost extra money to actually buy, of course)”
I assume it ‘s more than a right and actually an obligation? I doubt I’d have the option of sitting out the ticket-buying part for a year when the team is gonna be particularly bad.
With great rights come great responsibilities.
Rams PSL sales will be closer to the Vikings than the Cowboys. Rams will try to make it up with higher ticket prices.
And, again, the fact that the cheapest and best seats are the first to sell out says absolutely nothing about our society, other than the fact that human being live in it. For 2500+ years in every society around the world ticket sales have gone the same way.
If you actually have Roman Colosseum ticket price data, Ben, I would genuinely love to see that.
I do remember reading in history that Rome was worried about its ability to attract the best lions and thus needed the Colosseum.
Evidence that teams are generally bad at setting prices can be seen at baseball games. The Washington Nationals, for example, charge absurd prices to sit in the lower bowl in seats outside of the infield area.
Without the luxury of the extremely expensive tickets, fans would end up paying a lot of money for, essentially, slightly denser air (and, of course, the chance for a foul ball) while cheaper upper deck seats offer a much better view of the field. Not surprisingly, these “middle level” seats are unoccupied in all but the most prosperous of years for the Nats, but the seats behind home are packed.
I think in general the marginal improvement to “game quality” really isn’t there for most of these mid-level tickets except in periods of exceptionally high demand, so the rational choice would be to pass on them. There’s not a lot of prestige in saying–look at these expensive seats I got behind the foul pole.
“So far as we know [Roman] spectators did not pay for their tickets; attendance was one of the perks of citizenship. But how they were distributed is not clear. Given that everything in ancient Rome, ‘free’ or not, had its price, then we should probably imagine that people paid for membership of clubs and societies to which free tickets were issued. Or men of influence, powerful patrons, distributed tickets to their dependants and clients.”
https://books.google.com/books?id=XmK28Dd_8WEC&pg=PA109
To add on to Gdub, re: “Evidence that teams are generally bad at setting prices can be seen at baseball games.”…I quote Neil: https://www.fieldofschemes.com/2009/04/28/2141/yanks-field-level-seats-now-a-mere-1250/
Even the Yankees had their troubles.