Empty Seats: Are National Sports in Danger?
Some of the best memories that I have had growing up was going to sporting events with my father, whether it be NASCAR races or Blackhawks games. The excitement of seeing the leagues biggest stars take center stage, the crowd’s roaring, I never felt so alive. But nowadays when I look on TV, there is plenty of empty seats at NHL games, NBA games, NASCAR races, MLB games, and even NFL games! Could it be from high ticket prices, team talent, fan loyalty, or just from the advancements of watching a game on TV? Either way, they have all lately been feeling the real effects of a smaller attendance.
For years the decline of ticket sales has gone down straight into the gutter, for example the Detroit Pistons averaged only about 13,272 tickets per home game in 2017. That’s when they have a multi-million-dollar stadium that has over 21,000 seats. According to a 2016 article from 24/7 Wall St. “no franchise among the four professional leagues has seen a bigger drop in attendance over the last 10 seasons than the Pistons. Attendance has declined 30.8 percent over the past 10 years, according to the report, with an average filled capacity of 69.2 percent. The Philadelphia Phillies were second on the list, at 29.5 percent.”
One thing that is for sure when watching a sporting event, if the team you are watching has a bad record, or they don’t have any superstar talent, they will not fill the seats as much. Now granted the Cubs, and Red Sox, they both had long periods of time where they were terrible. Cubs and Red Sox had some of the worst times playing ball in front of their home field, but somehow, they were still able to pack the seats and have many sellout games. So, another factor to this would be team loyalty and how many real “fans” they have.
Could high ticket prices be the cause of the declining ticket sales at sporting events? According to TheMountaineer.com, these are the average costs for a family of four at different sporting events.
These prices are downright ridiculous for a family of four to spend on, this is a major factor on why there is lower attendance, because it seems now that professional sporting events can only be viewed in person by someone who has a little bit more wealth. There are plenty of factors as to why tickets prices go up so high for professional sporting events. The first factor as to why ticket prices are so high would be that the city could put huge taxes on entertainment in the city. That’s why when you go to a Bears or Cubs game half of your money you are spending on the ticket is tax. This doesn’t even count the food and merchandise that your family wants to buy, so at that point you are spending almost an extra $300 on overpriced food and beverages for your family when you could eat for a lot cheaper at your own home. Another reason for increased ticket prices would be that the team just came off winning a national championship or they are on a hot streak, more and more fans want to see the stars in person, but are turned off by the ridiculous ticket prices that plague the teams. This is what is slowly ruining professional sports, greedy, money hungry multi-million-dollar teams that do not put in the extra amount of effort to care for their fans. According to a 2012 article from the New York Post “From the day new Yankee Stadium opened, the Yankees stretched and surpassed the limits of logical affordability. It opened as — and remains — a clip joint, from $11 cups of beer, to $35 parking, to rows and rows of empty, obscenely priced, moat-encircled seats that have created a greed-inverted reality that shows more patrons seated far above and beyond the field than right next to it. Anyone with a sense of proportion knew that was coming from Day 1, in 2009, not in June of 2012. Entry to new Yankee Stadium has been entirely predicated on price gouging.”
As I was mentioning before, sometimes, nothing beats watching the games from the comfort of your own home. Now a days you can just go and sit right on your coach, push a button, and BOOM! You have the choice of watching 50 different games, from over 50 different angles from all the high-quality expensive television cameras that the network stations use. With the advancements in modern technology, we can get closer to the game than ever before.
I produced a 30-minute podcast and video to explain to you all about this growing issue.
