First I’ll paste in the data, then I’ll talk about it a little.
Bottom line for season tickets, it seems to us, is revenue, so we took Stats+ data and sorted by revenue. This puts Las Vegas smack on top, having created $43M in cashflow by selling what we think are 28,508 tickets (we get this by dividing that revenue by the ticket price each team reports). This means that, given their park seats 50K people, they’ve sold 57% of their capacity in the spring. Of interest is that the league’s gauge of Fan Interest had them starting the off-season at 99 (out of 100), and ending at 96. We note that the beginning point of the season was at the winter meetings—the point at which tickets go on sale.
There’s an $8M gap from Vegas to Long Beach ($35.6M) and San Antonio ($35M). The Surfers traditionally draw well, but the Outlaws are the buzz-baby surprise of the season—certainly buoyed by the free agent spending binge they’ve been on. We should note that Mike Calvaruso’s San Antonio club’s fan interest was at 81 at the end of the season, and jumped to 86 by the beginning of the winter meetings on the strength of signing Chang and De Castillo. It jumped further on subsequent signings. Given other numbers on the chart, it’s not out of line to suggest that the signings have generated as much as $7M-$8M in revenue that the Outlaws wouldn’t have gotten without them. We’ll see where they end the season.
TICKET PRICES
After the forum discussion on ticket prices last season, I thought it was interesting to see the scatter. A few mathy kinds of things first: the league average ticket price was $16.68, with a standard deviation of $4.22. The way GM’s set their tickets correlated with their team’s fan interest with a .5 power with a very high statistical significance…suggesting GMs on the whole do attempt to tailor their prices to how they perceive their fans will react. Duh, right?
Seattle ($28) had the league’s highest prices. Nathan Egan’s team sold only 28% of their park’s capacity, but brought in $32M in revenue, 7th in the league. This leaves him with 72% of his seats to sell in-season, which suggests that if he’s got a winning team, the club might be at the top of the table by season’s end.
On the whole, the top revenue draws tended to have their ticket prices are $18-$20, though, again, there’s more nuance to it than purely price.
A FEW INTERESTING COMPARISONS:
Let’s look, for example, at Charm City and Nashville, two teams who both drew just shy of $19M in revenue. Both teams also started the off-season at essentially the same Fan Interest (70 for CCJ, 69 for Nashville). Both teams have 45K seats in their parks. But Charm City set their price at $16 and Nashville at $11. In other words, since most of the items you’d think of influencing sales are equal in these two cases, this is an interesting test case to see what effect ticket prices might have.
At the end of the day, you can say it worked out even, since they both made almost $19M, but Brandon’s Jimmies sold only 32% of their seats, while Brett’s Goats filled up 47% of their stadium to do it. What this means is that Charm City has a higher capacity to sell going into the season, and may well end up with more revenue—of course, this is dependent upon how the teams actually perform.
There are other intriguing data sets. Look at Montreal and Atlantic City, for example. These are two more very similar cases, and they wound up selling equal shares of their equal capacities—yet Montreal made $7M more in revenue than Atlantic City. This is odd on first glance, and I’m not really sure what to make of it.
Another kind of interesting paring might be Yellow Springs and Omaha, who entered the off season with essentially equal fan interest, and who both sold about 35% of their capacity. Omaha’s ticket price was on that high end at $24, Yellow Springs was closer to average at $18. Their revenue was about the same at $31M. Note, however, that the Nine sold 20,746 tickets while Omaha sold only 16,143. In addition, while both sold 35% of their capacity, the Nine’s Utopia Field is a 60,000 seat monster, while Hawk’s Field seats only 45K—meaning the Nine have a higher top-end to fill up if things go well.
There’s a lot to get your brain tied up in knots over when it comes to the game’s finances, eh?
LET’S LOOK AT THE LOW END, EH?
Four teams (DM, HAW, VAL, and EDM) created less than $10M in season ticket revenue. To a degree, this isn’t overly surprising, since their fan interest measures are very low relative to the rest of the league.
At one point, several folks said teams should just raise prices, and that’s maybe not wrong…but take a look at Edmonton. Chris Robillard’s club is sitting at $15 (just under league average), and his sold only 5,091 tickets, good for only $6.2M in revenue. Compare this to Hawaii and Valencia (both in the 40s when it comes to fan interest) and you can see that raising prices didn’t help, and might have hurt just a little…except…of course…if there is actual fan interest penalties for raising ticket prices (which is probably there, but maybe not as far as I can tell), then Edmonton has already paid it, whereas Valencia and Hawaii have that ahead of them.
Then we come to Des Moines, who at 57 FI has a similarity mate in Mexico City (yes, I think those rain outs don’t help). The Kernels have a bit more room on Pat Tillman Memorial field than the Aztecs have in that mouthful of a named park, but the bigger difference between them is Fred’s got his price at $18.18, whereas Ed’s taken a conservative route at $8.50. Bottom line is pretty clear here: Mexico City’s made $5M more on 4,000 fewer tickets, meaning that team also has more capacity to sell than Des Moines has.
In other words, in retrospect, it appears Des Moines could have benefitted from raising prices at least a little.
OTHER ODDITIES
How is Rockville only at 78 fan interest? Brooklyn, at 63 Fan Interest and with a slightly smaller park, has hung with the Landis champs neck-and neck when it comes to generating revenue so far.
Seattle and Yellow Springs both dropped 5 points of Fan Interest in the time tickets were on sale. Looking at Phoenix, one assumes they dropped some, then bumped when they signed LaLoosh.
