Giants, Take Your Personal Seat License and…
This post doesn’t have a lot to do directly with sports marketing. But it does have to do with a lot of ticked off Giants fans who were hoping to some day get a hold of elusive season tickets. Then again, sports marketing shouldn’t be about alienating the fans who bleed blue for your team and spend their hard-earned money on your merchandise.
But the New York Giants have done that, with their new stadium they will co-own with the Jets in 2010 that has left many old-school season ticket holders (like my family) unable to keep their seats, and many more people who were on the waiting list (like me) unable to afford what was once the best ticket in town.
And what has it all boiled down to? The Giants may not be able to sell out their new stadium. And this is a team that was selling out games when they were the laughing stock of the NFL, and have sold out every game since the current Giants Stadium opened.
Here’s more from Newsday beat writer Neil Best. According to his column, the Giants are even in denial that they are having a hard time selling Personal Seat Licenses, the very thing that will keep the Parry family off the season ticket list since well before I was born.
Corporate greed at its finest. Why sell tickets to real fans when you can make even more money off the high society? Who cares if they know anything about the team, if you make season ticket blocks available to Madison Ave.? Those corporations will buy them up!
Unless of course a recession hits. And it did.
In a way, I’m glad I can’t afford either the low end $5,000 or upper-end $20,000 per seat for the PSL just for the right to buy season tickets, which will also jump up in price.
For one final season, my family will be able to cheer for Big Blue in Section 132, Row 13, Seats 15 to 18. That’s an area that’s now going for $20,000 per PSL. And those tickets are going to cost $700 each.
In 1979, when I went to see the Giants play the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, those seats went for $9 each.
Good luck finding people to fill those seats, Giants. I’ll sit home and watch them on television… unless the games are blacked out because you can no longer sell your games out.
March 10th, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Tim, I am right with you. I sit in section 124 and have had seats for over 40 years, going back to Yankee Stadium when they were an entertaining 1-11 if memory serves me correctly. My father and I have follwd them from the Stadium, to Yale Bowl, to Shea Stadium and to their current site in New Jersey.
The shame is that this never would have happend had Wellington Mara not passed on. He was a man of the common people, with fierce loyaty (too fierce when it came to coaches sometimes) to those around him. He would never had stood for charging ticekt holders of 20, 30 and 40 years over $20,000 just to walk into this stadium. Last call for me and many other fans this upcoming season.
March 10th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
I’m with you Tim. I’m an Eagles fan and the greedy bozos that run this franchise did the same thing to us a few years back. Granted NY prices are going to be higher than Philly, but the concept of selling the “right” to buy season tickets sounds like it belongs with a Madoff investment fund on Wall Street. Something inherently sleazy about this.
Sometimes a recession is a good thing. Maybe some of the excesses that have annoyed so many of us over the last few years will be corrected. Lets hope the excesses of franchise ownership are corrected as well.
March 10th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
I actually got an e-mail from the Giants on Monday - as someone on the waiting list - offering me a chance to update my profile and find out about season ticket packages.
Now the reason I added myself to the waiting list is because my brother had every ticket accounted for (he sold several of them… legally. And he gave some to charity). But if you’re on the wait list, you can buy tickets that were sold back to the Giants on a week-by-week basis.
Jim, we probably bumped into each other many times at the stadium and didn;t know it. Mike, hopefully you weren’t one of the Eagles fans who flocked upon Giants Stadium in 2005 (if I have the year right) when flash floods kept a lot of fans at home. Eagles pummeled the Giants that day, and all I remember is Eagles fans moving up front and trash talking the Giants fans (like any of the Giants fans were angels that day!), the Giants wearing those awful red jerseys, a guy in a black Santa suit with an Eagles belt buckle shouting profanities and getting beers dumped on him.
Sure, I had to explain to one nephew that it wasn’t the real Santa Claus… and keep the other nephew from trying to take the fake Santa on.
Good times!
June 21st, 2009 at 2:17 pm
I was at that Eagles game - I took another couple along with my wife. We got absolutely drenched but didn’t mind at all - we had a ball just being there and enjoying the game.
My family has had Giant tickets back to the Charlie Conerly, Frank Gifford & Kyle Rote days. I was a real fan then but that was the past. Today I just see football as a way for greedy owners to make more money. If they wanted a new stadium they could have financed it themselves - it’s their business. I’m still trying to decide what to do with my 6 (meaning $30,000 PSL tickets). Hard to let go because of the nostalgia but I just maybased on both principal and the fact that this is a cost I’m not sure I really want to bear.