Features
Repricing The House
Sports fans – some of them, at least – will pony up more for tickets in 2014, as the NFL and Los Angeles Dodgers make moves to reprice and scale their respective houses.
The NFL announced a price hike for the best Super Bowl seats for Feb. 2 at
At the same time, the lowest-priced tickets will drop from $650 to $500.
“We are looking to close the gap between the face value of the ticket and its true value as reflected on the secondary market,” NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy said Sept. 17. “The uniqueness of the Super Bowl in the New York/New Jersey market is also driving unprecedented demand and buzz.”
The second-highest tier of seats will go for $1,500 compared with $950 at the 2013 Super Bowl in New Orleans.
But not to worry – the NFL says that 40 percent of the roughly 77,000 available seats will still be priced below $1,000.
The Super Bowl is not, of course, a typical sporting event.
The participating teams distribute tickets for just 35 percent of the seats, and the league controls 25 percent – most of which go to corporate sponsors and partners.
The NFL will also raffle off 1,000 tickets at the $500 level, but those tickets will be non-transferable.
The league estimates that some 60 percent of the tickets that were sold via lottery for the 2013 game were flipped within 24 hours, according to the Wall Street Journal.
On the West Coast, baseball’s L.A. Dodgers will raise ticket prices on most seats at Dodger Stadium in 2014, two years after a new ownership group led by Guggenheim Partners and Magic Johnson bought the team from Frank McCourt.
Team president and CEO Stan Kasten said the ownership group first wanted to prove to fans that it was committed to putting the best possible team on the field, provide a good fan experience at the stadium, and reach out in the community before it raised prices.
The Dodgers have since invested in a revamped roster, expanded and upgraded stadium seating, and appear headed for the playoffs for the first time since 2009.
The team passed the 3 million attendance mark in August, the first MLB team to do so in 2013.
Attendance failed to reach the 3 million mark in 2011 for the first time in 16 years, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The biggest increase is for front-row seats between the bases, which will go up by $30 per game. Rows two through eight will increase by $20.
The team says the price for more than 45,000 seats will increase by $3 or less, and some field-level seats will be available for below $20 per ticket, less than in 2006.
For season ticket holders, the team says 58 percent of the 56,000 total seats at Dodger Stadium will work out to less than $20 per ticket.