By Chris Isidore, CNN
(CNN) — The Buffalo Bills play their first preseason game at their new Highmark Stadium on Saturday, but season ticketholders got a sneak peek at an open practice last week.
Some weren’t happy.
Social media was flooded with photos showing obstructed views of the field from some seats. Even though a handful of fans were upset over sightlines, there is an even bigger problem: how costly attending games will be in the new $2.2 billion stadium.
That includes higher ticket prices and personal seat licenses (PSLs), which just give fans the right to buy season tickets, not the tickets themselves. PSLs cost $750 to $50,000 per seat. That comes on top of the $850 million in taxpayer money already paid to fund construction.
Season ticketholder Angelica James, whose seats between the 20- and 30-yard lines wasn’t blocked, said she chose to go with worse seats this year for the same cost as last season. However, she’s not angry at her team.
“It’s not just the Bills,” she said. “It’s everyone in the world is trying to make money.”
Five other National Football League teams are planning new stadiums in the next five years, in Hammond, Indiana (for the Chicago Bears); Cleveland; Kansas City; Tennessee; and Washington, DC. They are all likely to arrive with their own PSLs, higher ticket prices and more premium seats, meaning fewer cheap ones.
The NFL’s last building boom at the start of this century raised the average cost of tickets by 30% during the first year of a new stadium, according to Victor Matheson, professor of economics at the College of the Holy Cross who specializes in the business of sports. He expects this next round will increase ticket prices by the same percentage, if not more, as well as more expensive PSLs.
PSLs are automatically included in new NFL stadiums, Matheson said, because they are big money makers. Under NFL rules, teams need to share ticket revenue with the rest of the league. But they can keep all of money earned from PSLs. Every NFL team with a new stadium has used them since the Carolina Panthers first introduced them at Ericsson Stadium in 1996.
The Bills raised an estimated $250 million from the sale of PSLs for its new 60,000–seat stadium, according to Kurt Badenhausen, sports business reporter for Sportico. That comes out to an average of about $4,000 per seat.
That’s what fans pay on top of the season ticket prices, which in the case of Highmark, can be double to comparable seats in the old stadium.
James and her husband, Cameron, were prepared to pay for PSLs along with somewhat higher ticket prices. But when they attended a meeting for season ticketholders, they discovered the seats they had purchased for $4,300 each last year would now cost $8,610.
“In our minds, even if it was $10,000 each for the PSL, and the tickets had gone up a little bit, that we would have been okay with that. But we walked out of that meeting being completely shocked,” she told CNN.
She and her husband decided to not re-up their club seats that came with various amenities, including coverage from weather and a private bar and bathroom. Instead, they downgraded to general admission seats at the same cost with PSLs of “only” $6,000 each.
For fans who don’t downgrade, however, new stadiums do have more bells and whistles, like wider seats and better concourses and concessions. Part of the reason new stadiums have higher ticket prices is because the fans are hypothetically getting a lot more for their money, according to Marc Ganis, a sports business consultant who works with the NFL and numerous teams.
“At least theoretically, everything related to the fan experience will be better,” he said.
However, new amenities require more room. That leads to fewer overall seats, and the cheap ones are being eliminated. For example, the Bills’ old stadium had a capacity to seat 71,600 versus 60,000 in the new one.
But it’s mainly strong demand for tickets, along with fewer seats, driving prices higher. The Bills website shows no season tickets are left for sale.
“Demand for live audience experiences came back with a vengeance after Covid, and it and it seems to have persisted,” Matheson said. “The number of tickets being sold in the NFL has stayed pretty constant over the last two decades because we haven’t added new franchises and stadiums aren’t getting any bigger.”
Following the complaints about obstructed views, Bills team executives told the media that many of those seats are being sold for events like concerts, not games. Less than 1% of fans, they added, had complained.
But for any fan with a railing or a cable in their sightlines, they are going to be unhappy after shelling out additional dollars.
“It might be a small percentage of people, but its still a lot of people,” said Sportico’s Badenhausen. “For those 600 or so fans, it’s a 100% of their seats being obstructed.”
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