How should professional sports teams pay to build their stadiums?
Definitely not with public funding. The use of taxpayer dollars to build professional stadiums is generally a terrible deal for communities since these stadiums won’t pay for themselves. Plus, in the case of top-tier professional sports teams, they’re owned by billionaires in leagues that generate billions in revenue, so they shouldn’t need the government’s help to build stadiums.
The Buffalo Bills, unfortunately, want government funding to build a new stadium. However, the team is also floating one good idea to help pay for it: personal seat licenses. It’s something that more professional sports teams should have when building stadiums.
A personal seat license is a fee that one pays to have the right to buy season tickets for a given seat in a venue for a team that plays there.
It serves as a way to help pay for a new venue without the team or the taxpayers having to pay for it — similar to selling the naming rights of a stadium. When the Raiders moved to Las Vegas, personal seat licenses raised about $400 million to help pay for the new stadium, and the Minnesota Vikings got about $125 million from personal seat licenses when building a new stadium in the 2010s.
If a team were to sell 50,000 personal seat licenses at $2,000 each, that would raise $100 million. The Raiders charged between $500 to $75,000 for personal seat licenses. Teams should use the market to their advantage and maximize revenue. If people are extremely wealthy and want to pay $1 million for personal seat licenses for front-row seats around midfield, let them. The smart approach would be to take the highest bidders for personal seat licenses.
Most NFL fans aren’t attending games in person often, so it wouldn’t make much difference to them. The games are on TV, and they can still watch even if tickets to the game are hard to get because the same people are going to games. I know plenty of New England Patriots fans who have never been to a game at Gillette Stadium, which has been open since 2002 and doesn’t have personal seat licenses. It makes sense because there are only eight regular-season home games per season. I’ve played football at Gillette the same number of times that I’ve attended a Patriots game there: once. The NFL is generally better on television anyway.
The other upside to personal seat licenses is that if more than one team uses the facility as its home venue, then licenses can be sold for that team as well.
While some might complain that personal seat licenses are greedy and a way to squeeze every last dollar out of fans, they’re still better than making the public pay for stadiums they don’t use. There is no good reason for working people to pay into that corporate welfare sham.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts. He is also a freelance writer who has been published in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other outlets.
