Good news for those at the front of the Broncos’ nearly 75,000 season tickets wait list:The team is not renewing season tickets for those who didn’t attend a game in 2016
Good news everybody! The Broncos want to make sure those greedy bastard season ticket holders won’t be able to make profits off of their tickets any more!
Oh shit, we actually didn’t go to any games last year.
Granted, we sold all of our tickets at face value, to friends and family. In fact the whole time we’ve bought four tickets, two of the seats have always gone to other people. In all the years we’ve been buying tickets, we’ve never sold a ticket for more than face value, and have made every effort to avoid selling them to fans of the other team. I realize that not every season ticket holder is as altruistic. There are people who make quite a bit of money off of their tickets, rarely go to any games and probably laugh all the way to the bank. The problem is that those people won’t be punished.
The people who will be punished will be the poor saps that used the NFL’s Ticket Exchange. If you’re not familiar with the service, Mike Shanahan will tell you all about it.
Over the last few years, the NFL and the teams have made huge efforts to get season ticket holders to use the Exchange to broker tickets. They’ll tell you it’s to ensure authenticity and combat scalping, but the reality is that the teams want to double-dip ticket revenue and take a cut for selling your tickets again. The irony here is that all the fans that thought they were doing right by using the Exchange, when now all they’ve done is give the teams ammunition to build a revocation case against them.
Right now my family is in the dark period of our season ticket stewardship. With two kids under 4, it’s become increasingly difficult to go to games. Between the packing, traveling, tailgating and finally seeing the game, seeing the Broncos is easily an 8-10 hour event. With the kids that gives us three options: cash in one of our coveted “free babysitting” cards, one of us leaves the spouse watching the kids all day while the other goes and parties (and feel really guilty about it, despite that we’re both happy to watch our own kids), or stay at home with the kids on one of the two family days we get each week. In addition, there are no more family events and obligations that prevent us from going to games. The one game we were planning on attending (the Patriots game), conflicted with Clara’s first dance recital.
However we know that before we know it the kids will have grown to a game-attending age (although stadium behavior now convinces me that it’s now 25, but that’s a post for another day), and our “dark period” will be followed up with a game-going renaissance where we’ll romantically pass our fandom onto our kids. In the end, isn’t this the point of season ticket ownership? Rather than invest in a team for a single season, fans are taking stock in the family experience that spans multiple years, hopefully into generations?
The other aspect that’s not considered is the fact that the NFL jacks up playoff ticket prices as well. A playoff run (of 2 games, mind you) typically cost season ticket holders 1/4-1/3 of what they paid for the season, which is always due right around Christmas when money is already tight for folks. A lot of people resort to selling next year’s tickets to recover the costs for the previous year’s playoff glory.
I get that there are people who abuse their season tickets, but these tactics aren’t going to punish those guys. If the Broncos wanted to punish them, they would be conducting stings of people selling on Craigslist or even on the street corner outside the stadium. You don’t even need to buy the tickets, just look at the seat numbers and flag the owners. Instead the Broncos are going to go with the low-hanging fruit and punish people that likely mean well and used their sanctioned scalpin-errrr-ticket-reselling tool.
More proof that the sport you love doesn’t love you back.