The owners of the Buffalo Bills, fresh off winning a $1 billion subsidy deal from the state of New York, sent 40,000 of their fans a thank-you note last week: a chart listing how much money each of them will be expected to give the team owners if they ever want to think about buying season tickets.
Tim Johnson, a 34-year season ticket holder in Section 130, was angered by what he saw in the survey.
Johnson said he would be looking at between $6,000 to $7,000 for each seat license, according to the survey. Johnson isn’t sure he’s willing to pay that much.
“With the prices they showed me, I don’t know if I’m going to bother,” said Johnson, who has gone to games for years with his two sons.
Here’s the price list, per the Buffalo News:
That’s a little confusing what with all the “high end” and “low end” stuff, but basically if Bills fans want to buy season tickets to sit anywhere but the nosebleeds, they’re going to have to look at spending upwards of $4,000 per seat just to be able to log in and access tickets. Then it’ll be $150 and up per actual ticket for each game.
This is the kind of thing that gets fans in an uproar — and sportswriters too, as witness the fact that the News expended a bigger word count on this than on most of its articles analyzing the tax money going into the deal. And given the history of personal seat licenses, it’s fair for them to be steamed: When PSLs first came on the scene, for the Charlotte Hornets in 1987, they were meant to be a free bonus for fans who bought season tickets, allowing them to pass along their place in the season-ticket line to whoever they wanted when they were done with it instead of having to throw it back to a general waiting list. A few years later, the same consultant who came up with the PSL idea, Max Muhleman, used it to help finance a $160 million Carolina Panthers stadium so the team wouldn’t have to demand public funding.
Not long after that, though, team execs started to think: Hey guys, what if instead of using PSL money to reduce our tax kickback demands, we ask for the tax money anyway and then still do the PSLs? We would be even richer, if such a thing is even possible! And thus the modern PSL was born, which in most cases doesn’t help fans or local taxpayers (or fans who are local taxpayers, which is most of them) but just goes to defray the team owner’s stadium costs.
At last count, Bills owners Terry and Kim Pegula were, after cashing their checks from the NFL’s G-4 stadium funding program and from the sale of naming rights, looking at a total cost to themselves of perhaps $150 million toward a $1.4 billion stadium. If we assume even an average $4,000 PSL sale, times 60,000 seats, that’s $240 million, which would bring the Pegulas’ costs to a nifty –$90 million — in other words, the Pegulas would turn $90 million in profit before the stadium even opens, while taxpayers are out $1 billion and Bills fans are forced to ante up thousands of dollars before they can even think of buying tickets. “Worst stadium deal in recent memory” is sounding more and more accurate.
A $4000 PSL in a market where I was able to get season tickets to a Super Bowl calibre squad for $450.
This is not at all surprising from a money grubbing scumbag NFL owner. It is interesting to me, however.
One of the problems with building a new stadium in Buffalo (and a few other markets) to extract even more money from the fans should be the cost of doing so. That won’t be an issue here, given that the Pegulas will now be effectively paid almost $100m to allow a new stadium to be built for them.
The problem that remains is the obvious one: Who is going to buy PSLs and tickets to the new stadium if doing so costs 7-10 times what it did at the old stadium?
As other owners have discovered, if you set a high bar for PSL pricing and fans mostly refuse to pay it, you then have an even bigger problem on your hands.
Maybe it’s time for the residents of Buffalo and WNY to tell the billionaire home heating fuel extortionists thanks but no thanks.
If the PSL pricing works as supposed to, though, it’s not a “cost” of buying tickets so much as a long-term loan — you get your money back once you decide to stop buying Bills tickets and sell your PSL.
(Unless they end up going with time-limited PSLs, of course, like the Raiders did, in which case, yeah, it’s just a cost.)
Or if they refuse to give it back like the Commanders…..
If it works as it is “sold as” working, that is true. But PSL’s have always seemed like NFTs to me.
If you are incredibly wealthy and want to sit in a shiny new stadium (inside the moat) with 10-12,000 of your fellow well heeled friends, I have no problem at all with the team charging you $10k for the privilege and using that money to float a construction mortgage or fund “their” portion of their own building.
I do not follow the PSL secondary market, but it seems to me that very few of them hold anything like their initial value. Is that your understand of it also?
And while the high end club seats’ PSL might remain valuable, I see no reason why anyone would pay for an upper deck 10yd line PSL in row 70 on the resale market.
Haven’t many teams found those hard to sell even in the initial offering?
“… fans mostly refuse to pay it, you then have an even bigger problem on your hands.”
What problem? It’s not like they have to make mortgage payments on the building. And they still get lots of TV $$ whether or not they fill the new (cost-free) stadium. Any problem belongs entirely to the people who bought and own the arena, which certainly isn’t the Pegulas.
It’s the Pegulas who are collecting the PSL money, so if no one buys them, it comes out of their pockets.
Dave: The problem is that ‘some’ fans will have paid it, which leaves the owners with the thorny problem of some fans having paid full price while others paid little or nothing at all (unless they are ok with 8500 people in attendance).
It’s essentially the same problem team owners in other sports have when they paper the house to try to make attendance look good. It works once or twice, and then the fans who paid full price realize they could have paid nothing for the right to buy tickets and still get them.
Paging Phil Mushnick!
Anybody who hates Rob Manfred and analytics can’t be all bad… and gets my vote for best use of ‘unctuous” in an MLB context.
Remember, Roger said that PSLs are great investments! Ask any Jets fan.
Why do racist white people pay money to team owners who support BLM, who then give the money to black football players?
Because the world is a much more complicated place than Drudge headlines make it seem to be.
Great comment Ty!