Not So Fast... From Arsenal's Website: Family Enclosure - Lower Tier Adult £18.50 Senior Citizen / Cannon £8.00 Junior Gunner £5.25 18.50 * 19 home games = 351.50 for a season (yes in pounds.) A far cry from £1000.
SUM checks will. The reason people are dropping nine figures on expansion fees isn't to play against LAFC. It's to get a piece of that multi billion dollar company while the MLS team is a side project.
I'm another person in the situation where I could potentially be priced out of attending as many games. I only attend 3 to 5 a year because of my schedule and living over 2 hours away. If tickets substantially increase in price I could wind up making it to only one or two. That sucks BUTTTT I get it. They arent building a modern downtown stadium just to hopefully increase attendance. They're going to expect to make more money per seat too. The Haslams didnt save us as an act of charity. They did it because they're in the sports business, they see an opportunity to get in on an upcoming sport that's in close proximity to their other team and theres opportunity for cross marketing. They're passion for sports led them to take a chance on us...but the finances still have to justify themselves in the end. I'm no capitalist, not even close and that's why I dont talk politics here...but even I know I dont deserve a handout when it comes to this. I'm fine with spending 50 dollars for my 30 dollar seat....if I feel like I'm getting that extra 20 dollars worth of experience (which I'm confident I will, hell an actual seat and a cupholder will go a long way for me). I could be completely wrong, but my perception is that a lot of the people that have problems with paying much more for tickets...are also the same people that dont put much of a premium on us having a new stadium and are perfectly happy at Mapfre at the fairgrounds. I could be happy staying at Mapfre indefinitely...but the reality is this club would not survive there. We have a rapidly expanding and rapidly improving league to keep up with. Clinging to what we happen to be used to and comfortable with doesnt save the Crew.
OK, here are my MLS season ticket findings. A few quick notes: This is not a strictly scientific survey, though I did my best to make it as legit as possible. These prices are based on averages for the most part. LAFC doesn't even list prices anywhere, though I did manage to find a list of prices from fans who are making their own list. DC doesn't have public prices either, though i was able to piece it together through DC fans here on Big Soccer. Canadian teams prices are in Canadian dollars, not American dollars. For those who don't know, you can click on an image to make it bigger.
Sure, but a Canadian is gonna pay in CAD, not USD. Direct currency conversion like that isn't necessarily 1:1, like how iPhones cost $1,000 in the US, 1,000 euros in Europe, and 1,000 pounds in the UK. I just left the CAD prices as they were to make it more relevant to those markets.
Yes. They're literally giving beer away at the tailgates. $15 gets you a parking spot, a six pack of beer to take home and more beer for right then/there. Essentially, the parking comes out to free.
Next time someone calls MLS a top flight league, they should be forced to watch tonight's Crew-Portland game again.
This is all good and well but cost of living has to come into play too. It's apples and oranges to compare Columbus and NYC and LA and some other big cities. Also according to the survey we would go from near the bottom on non club midfield to the very top at $1,700 which is crazy! Again our cost 9f living does not support this.
Cost of living? I'm not sure I understand your argument. Our cost of living is much lower than in most other MLS markets. Which would mean that people here have more disposable income to spend on things like soccer tickets. Cost of living, in most cases I've looked at, is most affected by housing, and ours is still pretty reasonable. What you seem to be implying isn't that Columbus residents can't afford to pay more for tickets - because considering the health of our local economy and our low cost of living, we could - they're just not used to having to do so. I mean, are concert ticket prices for nationally touring artist cheaper in Columbus because we're a bunch of Midwestern skinflints?
The argument is that there are certain places in the country where EVERYTHING is higher. Wages, rent, prices. The rent in my one bedroom apartment in Reynoldsburg is $465. The same thing in Queens is $1,750. But people in NY with the same job I have could afford that because they also get paid more. People in Ohio absolutely do NOT just have more disposable income lying around, because they don’t get paid as much to begin with.
Maybe so, but in terms of Crew tickets, it's not a cost of living argument, really. People in Boston don't have tons of cash lying around either. They may, on average, get paid more, but they also have to spend a lot more just to live there. So what? Plus, we're not talking about "Ohio." We're talking about the Columbus metro region, which is a lot better off economically than other other parts of the state. YMMV, of course. I'm someone who could easily get priced out of season tickets if they go up substantially (or I'd need to get cheaper, corner seats, perhaps). That has little to do with whether or not the pricing structure is fair. A helluva lot more to do with having two car loans, a kid in college and another who'll start college in a few years, and shitload of home improvements that had to be addressed in the past year (and are now loans we need to pay off). Poor, poor us. Doesn't mean the Crew should cut me a break with tickets, though. Anyway, as much as we hate Precourt and Garber around here, THIS issue is that the relocation saga was all about: are there enough fans in Columbus who are willing to shell out cash to support the team? New ownership and Bez are betting the answer is yes, and that a new downtown stadium is the key to getting us to that point. I certainly think it's possible that Columbus will rise to the occasion, buy more tickets, and make the club financially viable in the new stadium. But I'm not close to being convinced it's guaranteed to happen, and some of the comments in here don't make me feel any more confident.
Since cost-of-living comparison is being made, I picked this to quote, for no reason... It's not so much cost of living, but income distribution across the population. If we assume that incomes are distributed the same across the two areas, at least after some form of correction for cost of living, then it comes down to shear numbers. Boston has 4.9 million people, Columbus 2.1 million. That means Boston should have more than two-times the number of people above some magical income to cost of living ratio than Columbus. That means it should be easier for Boston to fill the stadium than Columbus. Anyhow, different topic... If you amortize $200 million over 20 years at 4%, and divide by 25,000, you get a 'per seat' cost for the stadium about $600. That means the average season ticket cost will need to be above that for tickets to cover costs of the stadium. In calculating the average, you need to consider the number of tickets available at each price point, not just average the different costs, which would essentially be assuming that there are equal number of each seat type. This means for each $1200 center circle club seat, the club can sell three endline seats for $400 each and make the same revenue -- have the same average.
But that assumes ticket pricing is only meant to cover stadium construction costs, right? It also assumes 25K seats, which I don't think we'll have. And it assumes that all of those tickets are sold, which is a bit optimistic. I understand your post was just meant to be illustrative. And, of course, the club will have lots of other revenue streams. Still, there are numerous variables that the FO will need to weigh/estimate in setting ticket prices, and of course only they know what their total revenue goals are.
Yeah, when I originally posted my findings, by "average price" I meant per area of stadium essentially, not necessarily taking into account each individual seat. For sections that had different prices, I did average the cost by amount of sections with that price, to try and find a more accurate number; and individual sections that had different prices I did eyeball and make educated calculations, but I didn't take the time to break it down by seat.
And, of course, that is assuming all sales are by season ticket basically, which discounts prices. If people really cared about the team, they wouldn't get season tickets, they'd buy by game, but of course we'd all pay more so fvck that lol. Not to mention utilities, insurance, staffing, supplies, logistics, blah blah blah. That is where merch and food / bev comes in. Parking as well, though it appears there won't be any, which will affect pricing decisions for other things. This doesn't even take into account on the field stuff lol. People will scream "SUM MONEY!!!", and while I agree that assuming they are a decent size (otherwise why would people invest in MLS?) I still have yet to see a concrete number that justifies that opinion.
The $600 per seat cost is also constant over the 20 year amortization period. So, in year 20, when prices would go up 50% or so due to inflation, the debt service would be the same. The advantage of buying over renting... But, yes, illustrative. operating and maintenance costs aren't included. Buts, it's also only one of the revenue streams, so, maybe naming rights cover O&M? Game day advertising and TV covers soccer operating expenses. Not sure how sports businesses think about these types of things, and money is fungible, but I would tend to think about things in those terms. It in the least give you revenue benchmarks/expectations. I also forgot the most important aspect of things... profit. I'd want at least 7% per year.