When I was driving home from Indianapolis last week, I had a couple of hours to think about a lot of different things.
Something that ran through my head was a series of things that are sports-related that bother us. Things we see that either don’t make sense or we understand exactly what was happening and it bothers us.
As it turned out, most of the things I came up with revolved around tickets.
One of the things that is baffling to me is when an organization announces that the stadium where they play their home games will begin implementing a Permanent Seat License ticket plan.
The PSL allows a fan the first option of renewing their season tickets each year.
Here is how it works.
Each year, a fan we will call “Jerry” wants to be a season ticket holder for the Bears.
He goes to the Bears website and clicks all the clicks he needs to click to get to the point where he’s going to pay for his ticket.
At Soldier Field, a little more than half of the tickets are in PSL licensing sections. For the sake of our discussion, the place where Jerry wants to sit is in a PSL section.
Jerry will have to pay an extra fee—a PSL fee—before he can buy those tickets. What he gets in return for that fee is the ability to purchase those exact same seats for the next season.
Without a PSL, you could renew your season tickets but you may not sit in the same seats, the same section, or even the same general area.
Teams will tell you that they use that extra money for stadium renovations and amenities, but they aren’t government entities and therefore they don’t have to prove to you how they spend those dollars.
Another thing that is really hard to get a grip on is when a team raises ticket prices, and then gives you these completely lame reasons as to why.
For example, the Dallas Mavericks traded Luka Doncic to the Lakers for the oft-injured Anthony Davis. Doncic, while not your traditional athletic-looking basketball player, is highly skilled and regarded as one of the top 5 players in the current NBA.
The GM in Dallas said at the time of the trade that Doncic was a defensive liability because of his physical conditioning (he’s…lumpy), and Davis is a top 10 defender in the league…and then he reminded us all that defense wins championships.
But Davis is hurt (again) and not playing and not playing defense and not helping the Mavs win games.
So, naturally, the Mavericks announced Monday they were raising ticket prices for next season. And it’s not a little raise in prices. We’re talking about an 8.6-percent increase!
That’s pretty salty.
Fans have every right to ask “what are we getting for that increase?”
The franchise will tell you they need that extra revenue to be competitive.
Just stop it.
The Cubs front office believes they are masters of the concept of just raising tickets with their only explanation being “we need this money to compete.” I think if we opened the Ricketts family’s books, we’d find they were making a lot of money while putting mediocre teams on the field.
And this next part will come across as a very “old man rant”, but the digital ticketing process is very annoying.
I understand and appreciate teams and stadiums trying to put an end to fraud and counterfeit ticketing, but it feels like there should be a better way than what they are doing now.
Currently, you have to have a smart phone in order to attend a sporting event above the high school level, and there are some high schools that are also doing away with cash at the gate.
For older people, or even a younger person who is not very tech savvy, digital ticketing can discourage a grandparent from taking their grandchild to Parkview Field for their first baseball game, for example.
As the consumers, it feels like the teams and stadiums are trying to make it harder for us to get in to watch their teams play.
I mean, we’re spending our hard-earned money on what is most certainly not an essential product. A sporting event, at any level, has nothing to do with food, clothing or shelter, right?
They should be catering to us, shouldn’t they? They should be asking us what we need to make our experience better.
By the way, the answer to that last question is “I need you to move your mascot out of my way while I am tying to watch the game I paid all that money for tickets for.”