Professional sports are much more an EVENT than they ever were in the past. In a world where celebrity is celebrity for being celebrity, sports are receiving their share of that effect.

Professional sports are much more an EVENT than they ever were in the past. In a world where celebrity is celebrity for being celebrity, sports are receiving their share of that effect.

Huge part of it.

The celebrity effect is why rising salaries have had the paradoxical effect of making the business more lucrative. Pace the Brooklyn Dodger myth, people don't want the players to be the everyday guys playing stickball on the streets with kids; they want them to be rich guys living The Life.

I am not sure of this but a buddy told me that corporations can no longer write off the seats. They can write off the cost of the box so that at Pac Bell, or whatever its now called, you buy a box and the seats come free.

The one thing I don't understand is why a baseball fan wouldn't want to sit in comfortable seats at a major league stadium(ceteris paribus).

I guess you're harder core if you seat in very uncomfortable seats for love of the team, but to me, you're only really hard core if you're (say) running the Dakar Rally (vs. watching baseball).

I am not sure of this but a buddy told me that corporations can no longer write off the seats. They can write off the cost of the box so that at Pac Bell, or whatever its now called, you buy a box and the seats come free.

That doesn't make any sense. What part of the box are they buying? The idea of the box? The right to use it whenever they want, but for free on game days? That sounds like an urban legend.

Many season deals in the newer stadiums come in two parts: you pay for a "seat license" or "box license" or some other such term that gives you the option to then actually buy the tickets. The new Cowboys stadium in Arlington has that kind of structure; that may be what GregQ is talking about (edit: if perhaps in some cases the box is paid for and then the seats, somehow, get comped, I dunno).

I think he was saying that you could not just buy tickets and then claim that they were for a client and write them off. So what you have to do is buy a box, and the team then comps you the tickets. The act of buying the box is what makes it a business expense. At least that was my take of what he was saying.

I don't think there is any question that this argument of building for scarcity has a positive effect on pre-sales and season ticket sales. Not sure if people realize, but the vast majority of tickets today are pre-sold well in advance of the game. This was not the case at all, just 15 years ago.

Being able to pre-sell a large part of your ticket inventory is great for a team. It lowers a lot of expenses, advertising... and manpower needed to just sell tickets. You can focus your people on growing revenue among the people that are "locked in" for the year. It helps planning too. The scarcity argument really does help the pre-sale of tickets.
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Sure, most teams will have 10 dates on the calendar they could sell 70,000 tickets too. But you don't build your stadium for just 15% of your events, you build a stadium that is most practical for the majority of your events. The quality of the event for the fan does suffer when you have large swaths of the stadium vacant for a majority of your events. A half filled 70,000 seat stadium is not nearly as exciting as a 100% filled venue.

There are other good reasons for smaller stadiums that what I just cited.

The CPI is based I believe on the proverbial "bag of goods" and it definitely isn't perfect and all encompassing. CPI tends to miss the boat in niche products and non-necessities.

The pre-sell would exist without the smaller stadiums. Pre-sell sales have been driven by corporations and the rich getting richer's desire for the best seats. Those "best seats" are the scarce commodity and they would still be the scarce commodity even if the stadium held 80,000 people. The Vet at one point was the largest stadium in baseball but their 200 level infield seats were still a scarce commodity despite the fact that they had 50,000+ seats. 200 level from third to first was reserved for season ticket holders and were not available to the general public until gameday if those tickets were unsold. After April and May it was virtually impossible to get those seats unless you had a season ticket. If you are a Philadelphia corporation and you wish to buy baseball tickets you were going to buy 200 level season tickets.

The amount of seats didn't cause season tickets to go up it was corporations and rich people that caused season tickets to go up.