My soccer team (St. Louis City SC) is hosting a contest for four primo seats and some other swag for four people. If I won, I’d end up going by myself. Not one person among my friends, family and co workers would watch a soccer game if it was in their backyard and the beer and weed were free.
What would happen to those other three seats? Would they sit empty and I got 3x extra swag? Would the sponsor sell them to the general public at fair market value? Would I be able to sell them? Would I be compelled to find three other people on pain of forfeit?
I’m not sure about the swag, but in the contest you describe, you’d be winning four tickets. If you couldn’t find anyone to go with you, you’d still have the four tickets, and those other three seats would stay empty if only you went.
I have a hard time seeing a reason why you’d be somehow compelled to find three other people to attend, nor any reason that you would need to turn the tickets back if they were going to be unused. If you are truly concerned that that could be the case, read the contest rules (which the team is legally obligated to make publicly available).
People get tickets to sporting events and don’t actually attend all the time, for any number of reasons (getting sick, bad weather, family emergencies, terrible team playing, etc., etc.); the only difference in this case is that the tickets are a gift to you, rather than you having purchased them.
It might be that these particular tickets are in some premium area that will be prominently visible in the TV broadcast. In that case, I could see why the host team would not want seats there to be empty, so as not to leave the impression that its games have poor attendance.
I’m suprised at this. I am no sports fan, but I went to watch Zambia vs Zimbabwe at our National Stadium. It was an interesting cultural experince.
I was with Zambian fans, and we sat in the Zambian supporters section. An interesting cultural experience, if nothing else. Zambia won, so angry Zimbabweans started throwing softdrink cans at us… Zambians catching them and spraying them all over in celebration. Happy chaos in the Zambian part of the stands.
Couldn’t you just put them up for bids on some local internet group? Surely you aren’t such a horrible, offensive person that NO soccer fan would be willing to sit beside you.
While people are supposed to declare as income the value of any prizes won, and pay income tax, damned near nobody does. Also good bet the team is not gonna give the winner a 1099.
I just checked that team’s website. For a random game a month from now, the “primo” seats are $125 each. The cheapos are $40. For tomorrow’s game the prices are higher as they “auction” off the last of them to the highest bidders before dumping the prices at the last minute. Welcome to modern computerized “yield management.”
Wouldn’t the polite thing be to turn the extra tickets back into the organization so they can find someone else to use them? Or perhaps offer them to a charity or to a children’s hospital so some sick little tyke could go.
My then wife and I won a trip to the British Virgin Islands including flight, hotel, food, booze and a couple hundred in spending money. We didn’t get tax forms.
You probably aren’t going to get physical tickets. It’ll be a bar code on a ticket ap. The same code will get you 4x the schwag.
The tickets and prizes are yours to do with what you want, including doing nothing with them. You don’t even have to go to the game. Those seats will sit empty. They can’t give them to someone else since you’re entitled to use them for that game. You could show up with 5 minutes left and still be entitled to the seats.
It’s not that unusual for primo seats to go unused. If you watch baseball, you’ll often see vacant seats right behind home plate. Sometimes they fill up as the game goes on, sometimes they don’t. And sometimes if the home team is losing, the primo seats will empty out as the games go on.
One situation where they deliberately fill the seats is something like a TV awards show. They want all seats to be occupied when they show the audience, so they’ll have people hired to sit in empty seats. The empty seat may be because someone didn’t show up or because they went to the bar or bathroom. If you won tickets to the Oscars but you went alone, they’d have other people sitting in the seats around you. But in a sports match, the seats will stay empty.
As already said, the other three seats would just stay empty, since you hold the tickets for them. There’s an interesting example of this on a large scale at every Maple Leafs hockey game during the regular season.
As the TV cameras pan around the stadium, you can see big swaths of empty seats down in the premium lower bowl, and this is despite the fact that the entire arena is always sold out – always, every single seat. That’s because most of the expensive lower bowl seats are held by corporate season ticket holders, who are not particularly dedicated hockey fans but just use them as perks, or sometimes resell them, but often just don’t bother to do either, so the seats stay empty. It seems very unfair to the many hockey fans out there, but that’s the free market.
Some years back I won a package that included r/t airfare for two, three nights hotel and a backstage pass to a tv show. At the end of the year I received a 1099 for the retail value of the first two items, plus an arbitrary amount for the third.
All the season ticket deals I’ve ever explored include the right to sell only a couple of them on the official ticket exchange, commonly stubhub in the USA.
An NHL regular season has 41 home games. Someone owning a full 41-game season ticket may be able to sell (WAG) 4 of them. But not 36 of them. For a corporate perk/marketing department, the whole expense of the season ticket is just a cost of doing biz. Probably not worth the hassle to detail a flunkie to try to sell back just a few of the unused ones.
I didn’t know that! That may well be the case here, too. Also worth mentioning that team officials, players, and NHL officials all get their own quota of free tickets to hand out, and they may not always bother, hence more empty seats. A friend of mine once knew the Leafs head coach, who had this marvellous loose-leaf binder filled with many premium-seat tickets to every home game, just for him to hand out. I think one of the reasons that lower-bowl tickets are so extraordinarily expensive is to subsidize the relatively large numbers of seats that aren’t actually paid for but are occupied by freeloaders. Even I got free tickets from time to time, but certainly not often!
