There have been a flurry of articles of late asking and trying to answer the question “Why are NFL stadium getting smaller?” in the wake of plans by the Buffalo Bills owners to go from 71,000 to 62,000 seats and the Tennessee Titans owners to go from 69,000 to 60,000. The Tennessean newspaper — brutally paywalled, but also pssst — said that the smaller size has “perplexed fans,” but then cited a bunch of team sources saying really this downsizing is for you, the fans:
The Titans don’t sell out the current 69,000-seat stadium for most of their games, [Titans CEO Burke] Nihill told council members during a November meeting.
“We didn’t start with an arbitrary number,” Nihill said. “We started with, what is the right experience for fans? And then (considered) a diverse range of products, and 60,000 is the right number.”…
The smaller scale of the proposed stadium is meant to “feel more civic (and) less ostentatious, as NFL stadiums often are,” architect David Manica told Metro Council members in early November.
It’s a departure from older stadium design strategies, which sought to pack in seats to meet capacity goals. The new school of thought focuses more on “fan experiences,” according to the Titans and NFL officials.
“The term ‘nose-bleed seat’ is not a positive term,” Nihill said.
Okay, that’s a bunch of reasons right there, which we will take one at a time:
- The Titans can’t sell out now. Tennessee is actually at 99.5% capacity according to official ticket sales figures, after hitting 99.2% last season. It’s possible that some of those tickets are discounted or freebies — known as “papering the house,” and more common when the NFL blacked out games on TV that weren’t sellouts — but we’ll come back to this.
- The Titans don’t want the stadium to feel ostentatious. The team plans to spend over $2 billion (a lot of that in public money) and has released renderings featuring people attending a concert where the stage is held up by gravitonium, so it’s maybe a tad disingenuous to suggest that they’re trying to keep the place feeling homey.
- The Titans want to eliminate nosebleed seats. This is often a claim for new stadiums — but in reality, whether you consider your seat a nosebleed has nothing to do with how many fans have better seats than you and everything to do with how far you personally are from the game, and newer stadiums tend to jam in so many luxury boxes that even at smaller capacities, the worst seat in the new house is often worse than the worst seat i the old one. It’s true that Manica has tried to mitigate this a bit by increasing the rake of the proposed upper decks — in regular English, they’ll be steeper, meaning the upper upper decks will be a bit closer to the field — but since none of them will overhang the lowest deck at all, it’s still not likely to feel extremely intimate.
When it comes down to it, NFL teams are designing stadiums based on how much money they will make them, and capacity comes into play there in two ways: cost and ticket demand. On the first front, obviously it doesn’t make sense to spend, say, an extra $20,000 on building an additional seat if it’s not going to bring in at least $20,000 in extra revenues over time; team owners, then, have an incentive less to eliminate nosebleed seats than to eliminate cheap seats, especially as construction costs soar.
Which brings us to the second point, which is that cheap seats don’t only affect the prices you can charge for the cheap seats, but also bring down overall demand for all seats once fans realize they can get into the game without paying through the nose. Sports teams have known this for a while now, but it really started hitting home around 20 years ago when the Boston Red Sox started jacking up prices through the roof, knowing fans would pay almost anything to score any tickets at tiny Fenway Park. Ever since then, smaller has been better, though no team has yet gone so far as to build a stadium with just one seat and then sell it for $1 billion to Martin Shkreli.
Finally, the NFL has a particular reason to want smaller stadiums, and it’s all about big-screen TVs. Here’s NFL VP Eric Grubman way back in 2013, fer chrissakes:
“What if a new stadium we built wasn’t 70,000, but it was 40,000 seats with 20,000 standing room?” he said. “But the standing room was in a bar-type environment with three sides of screens, and one side where you see the field. Completely connected. And in those three sides of screens, you not only got every piece of NFL content, including replays, Red Zone [Channel], and analysis, but you got every other piece of news and sports content that you would like to have if you were at home.
“Now you have the game, the bar and social setting, and you have the content. What’s that ticket worth? What’s that environment feel like to a young person? Where do you want to be? Do you want to be in that seat, or do you want to be in that pavilion?”
That’s still about selling tickets — in this case, tickets to watch the game on TV in the stadium — but the point is that modern football fans (or as Grubman called them, “young people,” because we weren’t saying “Gen Z” back then) are fine with watching games on giant 4K screens, so there’s no reason to spend a lot of construction dollars on adding more seats that will just make it harder to charge top dollar to those few fans who genuinely want to be at the game. That sounds a lot less noble than optimizing “fan experiences,” certainly, but it would be more honest to say: We’ve decided only to sell tickets to rich people, and everyone else can either watch at home or pay to watch in our sports bars. This is the future of sports, at least so long as the supply of rich people holds out, and that seems like a safe bet for now.
“Brutally paywalled.” I work at a newspaper. My colleagues and the reporters at the Tennessean are trying to earn a living. Considering the Tennessean’s report is the catalyst for your post, please be more understanding.
I work in journalism too. There’s nothing wrong with paywalls, but when you completely restrict important news — or even bad stenography journalism, as in this case — from anyone who’s not a subscriber, you’re putting profit ahead of doing your job of informing the public.
The Tennesseean is owned by Gannett, which has been rapidly downsizing its news divisions even since it was bought in 2019 by a private equity firm that it prioritizing quick money over providing a decent product:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/19/business/media/gannett-gatehouse-merger.html
You’ll note there that the new head of Gannett promised that any cost savings “is not going to come from editorial.” How that’s going:
https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2022/gannett-tells-its-news-division-that-more-layoffs-are-coming-dec-1/
The message to hard working die-hard fans is, “we don’t want you, we want rich casual fans who would rather hang out at venue bars and glance at a screen”. Message received, but don’t think I’ll help you build venues where I’m not even wanted (even if I am wanted, I still don’t want public money build your venue).
That works so long as you get to help decide who builds venues, but:
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/billionaires-provided-15-percent-funding-midterms
The Arizona Coyotes are trying a much smaller arena, a quarter the size of the average NHL arena and still can’t sell out. Reports are they are selling about 3,000 tickets, comping about 1,000 tickets and ASU is filling the 800 seat student section. So much for the huge untapped East Valley fan base. Even though the Coyotes are the least valuable major sports franchise in North America and have been bleeding red ink for 27 years, they have $2,100,000,000 in their pockets for an arena and entertainment district. If the Tempe City Council can’t see that having the name Tempe (sponsor) Entertainment District in Tempe and the Tempe logo at center ice isn’t worth $133 million they are about to get really ripped off.
I think a bit more professionalism could come in handy when trying to get donations, it’s no mystery to anyone what your real background is, maybe you hide it maybe not who knows, however by breaking the second commandment and insulting Christ there you will not be getting any donations from me and I hope it ends up dissuading many from any sort of donation or subscription. Your compatriots over at the NYT and such as well as most of the owners and pols notwithstanding.
Whoa!
I wasn’t aware that Cab-Hailing Purse Lady counted as a graven image!
what
Hmmm….so, too Jewish ?
Thank you for your “input” I have made sure to donate to Neil’s site and his wonderful actual reporting.
Does the league still have 70k seat requirement for a stadium to host a Super Bowl? Anything can be waived for the right price.
Nashville would likely become a regular stop (i.e. Miami and New Orleans) on the Super Bowl circuit.
Stadiums that can be expanded to 70,000 seats temporarily are still eligible.
I love the NFL, love the on the field product but I hope Nashville will reject “the tiniest stadium in the NFL.” The Titans are trying to present it as something to be proud of. No thinking smaller isn’t something to be proud of. Thinking about how to truly become the state’s team and working on marketing to East and West Tennessee and building for the future is. 2.2 Billion yet fewer seats than anyone? And even if Nashville got a Superbowl or SEC Championship game, how many would they get when there are tons that hold a lot more people? Pay for it yourself 70,000-72000 seats and a party area. Not to mention we still don’t know how much a Nissan Stadium renovation would cost really. Let’s get those figures first.