For all intents and purposes sports salaries will never really go down, it’s simply a case of supply and demand.
professional teams will still demand talent(professional athletes) and the people who are the athletes will supply that for a high cost.
I don’t really follow major sports but I’ve heard a lot of people complaining lately that an average guy can’t take his boys to a game anymore; the ticket prices are just out of control. People are saying going to sporting events is becoming a white-collar activity, and the best regular Joes can do is sit in the creaky bleachers 3 blocks away, and still pay a fortune to do it.
My only experience with this was back in the summer of 2007. A guy I worked with was talking about his Cardinal’s season tickets, and I kind of off-hand mentioned that I like the Carolina Panthers. He said they were playing each other soon, and he was actually going to be out of town that day, so he’d sell me his tickets at face-value. I seriously thought about it, figured it’d be a fun day out with the wife, and asked him how much-- expecting him to say something like 40 to 60 bucks. Now, mind you - this was in 2007, when the playoffs were a joke for the Cardinals, much less the Super Bowl. His response? “Four hundred and fifty dollars each.”
True. $41 million in guaranteed money is not bad considering the state of the economy and perhaps the NFL, though.
Some free agents this year certainly took a hit, but the era of huge athlete salaries is not about to end. It’s a recession and a bad one, but it’s not the collapse of civilization. The U.S. economy’s likely to pick up later this year or next year and millions upon millions of people are STILL buying tickets, even if prices are down.
That’s been true for years, and it goes for concerts, too. It’s all entertainment, a.k.a. discretionary spending, so as long as somebody still has enough to buy the tickets prices will always go up. It sucks, but there’s not much to be done about it.
I dunno, we had Panthers season tickets in '95 and '96, and went to a fair amount of Hornets games when I was growing up, and my dad never made a ton of money. And we weren’t sports fanatics, either.
I agree concert prices are getting silly, but I don’t think they’re in the same league as sports tickets yet. I did refuse to see my favorite band for $55 last time they were here, though, because I saw them at the same venue in the same month a year prior for like $28, and they hadn’t gotten any more popular.
Not quite. Supply and demand meet revenue. If you can not fill the seats ,the money is not there to pay them,
That’s amazing. I just checked the the 2008 single game ticket sale section of the Cardinals’ website and the highest single ticket was $102.50. I’m not saying that’s not too high a price to watch the Cardinals - it is - but it isn’t $450. Your co-worker was trying to rip you off, looks like.
Wow, that is pretty damning. He was an older, honest gentleman whom I knew pretty well and trust, though. I gotta think there’s another answer somehow.
Do they have a seat license system there? If so, he might have been factoring a proportion of his seat license into the cost of the tickets or something like that.
I’m really not sure; I haven’t been to the new stadium yet. I did do a little bit of googling earlier and saw some tickets are $370, so that would be a better starting point from which to get to $450, if they have some kind of system like you describe. He mentioned that they were particularly good seats.
The Cardinals have no PSL system at either Sun Devil Stadium or the new one.
I paid $120 face value for my NFC Championship playoff tickets face value. There is no way on earth any ticket, even front row 50 yard line cost anywhere close to $400 for a regular season game.
My first Detroit Lion season tickets set me back 35 bucks. That was the whole season. And that was before they added in the exhibition games. I was real pissed when they added face value prices to the pre-season, which are hard to give away.That was in about 1964-5 .I had them until Barry Sanders walked.
As pointed out, your buddy was trying to rip you off.
I can take my wife and daughter to a Blue Jays game for about sixty bucks, which includes three hot dogs and drinks. I don’t think that’s all that bad.
I agree that it doesn’t look like that could’ve been the face value of the tickets, but he wasn’t trying to rip me off; he’s a good guy. Maybe he had a box or something, I don’t know. The guy had a $150,000 dune buggy, so it wouldn’t surprise me. He didn’t skimp on entertainment.