Monday, July 02, 2012

Bucking the trend

Here's a WSJ story from over the weekend about the NFL's desperation to turn around its sagging stadium attendance numbers.  

Professional football, America's most popular and profitable sport, is preparing to tackle a glaring weakness: Stadiums are increasingly empty.

As part of sweeping changes designed to give teams more flexibility to fill their seats, the National Football League is watering down its controversial TV "blackout" rule, which restricts local broadcasts for games that aren't sellouts. And this season, for the first time, fans in the stadium will be able to watch the same instant replays the referees see during reviews of controversial calls.


The obvious thing nobody wants to talk about is ticket and concession prices are way too high while the average fan has less and less money to spend on them. Saints tickets, while certainly not cheap, are still the best bargain in the league. So it isn't surprising to learn that the Saints lead the league in attendance measured against stadium capacity.

But, of course, the NFL (and the WSJ) doesn't want to talk about income inequality so they focus instead on comparative pricing of luxuries. The article claims that.. you know... because of the internet, the at-home experience is a better value than the stadium experience nowadays.

With declines in ticket sales each of the past five years, average game attendance is down 4.5% since 2007, while broadcast and online viewership is soaring. The NFL is worried that its couch-potato options—both on television and on mobile devices—have become good enough that many fans don't see the point of attending an actual game.

"The at-home experience has gotten better and cheaper, while the in-stadium experience feels like it hasn't," said Eric Grubman, the NFL's executive vice president of ventures and business operations. "That's a trend that we've got to do something about."


I think this is bullshit reasoning. Even before internet tools were available, it was always true that fans had better access to news, replays, and out of town scores if they stayed home and watched the game on TV. If anything, mobile technology has already made the stadium experience more like the at-home experience. Ten years ago fans who wanted up to date stats and news would bring radio headsets with them and listen to the play by play broadcast.  Smartphones have obsoleted that.  Now fans can keep up with stats and scores, check their fantasy roster, and push snarky comments out on Twitter from the stands.  I like that the NFL wants to amplify this affect by making mobile and wifi more accessible at the stadium but it should be obvious that mobile technology isn't what's been discouraging people from attending games. All things being equal, it's actually made it easier for fans to bring their living room advantages with them.  Were it not for the prohibitive cost of admission and concessions for people with less and less disposable income, more fans than ever before would be tweeting from the game.

The one advantage the stadium has always had over the living room is that it offers fans an opportunity to go outside and talk to people and do that whole community party thing that's at the heart of the success of pro sports in the first place... and also happens to be something New Orleans does better than anybody, as the attendance numbers here demonstrate. $9 beer at the dome still sucks but with comparatively low ticket prices, Saints fans still value the shared public experience of the moment enough to tolerate these hazards.

Nine dollar beer

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