Soaring Season Tickets

The upcoming openings of three new stadiums in the New York City metro will mean state-of-the-art facilities with better sightlines and new concessions and restaurants for sports fans.

But the costs for all those shiny new details haven’t been cheap, and future ticket prices at the Mets’ Citi Field, the new Yankee Stadium and the Giants’ and Jets’ new Meadowlands Stadium are going to reflect those upgrades.

Specifically, season ticket holders are being asked to share in the debt, according to a recent New York Times report, for the three buildings that range in price from $800 million for Citi Field to the $1.3 billion Yankee Stadium and $1.6 billion Meadowlands Stadium.

“Here I am buying a stadium for [Giants President] John Mara,” a Giants season ticket holder told the Times. “I’d love to see him issue a registration statement like a stock offering that would disclose information we don’t know. This is a greedy ploy with the only benefits going to them.”

The team will reportedly charge between $1,000 and $20,000 for personal seat licenses, plus $85 to $700 per game ticket.

However, those PSLs could bring in roughly $185 million to help finance the team’s stadium, for which costs have more than doubled, Mara told the Times.

“It’s impossible to build a stadium of this magnitude without public funding unless you do something significant with ticket prices or PSLs,” he said.

Giants fans won’t be the only ones feeling the burn when it comes to ticket prices.

Tickets for the best seats at the old Yankee stadium that went for $1,000 per seat per game will reportedly jump to $2,500 per seat in the new building, and other areas of the stadium will range from $135 to $500 for season tickets.

And over at Citi Field, Mets season ticket holders will pay nearly double what they paid for the best stadium seats this season, from $276 to $495 per game.

Dave Howard, the Mets’ executive VP for business, told the Times the best seats have been priced higher so that other seats can remain affordable.

“The market indicates that a sector of our fan base is willing to pay a premium price for a premium location,” Howard said.

With the price increases, some fans have begun flipping seat licenses or reselling tickets to popular games on secondary ticketing sites, which, in the future, may prove necessary just to shoulder the costs of season tickets.

“We have 130,000 people on our waiting list,” Mara told the paper. “We could charge anything and still fill the stadium.”