| 02 June 2011
How badly do you want an arena built in Seattle? Would you be willing to sacrifice your ability to purchase tickets there in order to have an NHL or an NBA team in Seattle?
Personal Seat Licenses (PSLs) are rapidly becoming a popular item for professional sports teams. The idea is simple – consumers essentially “own” a seat – they purchase the right to buy season tickets in their seats. For a slightly lengthier description read here.
PSLs are much more common in the NFL than in any other sport. This is because in the current (now defunct) collective bargaining agreement, income from PSLs was not subject to revenue sharing – the purchase of PSLs went directly to the team bank account.
PSLs are a one-time source of revenue – once they are sold, they cannot really be sold again. The major cost PSL revenue goes towards is stadium construction. New Meadowlands stadium, the recently-built facility for the New York Jets and Giants, was financed mainly by selling PSLs to fans of both teams.
I don’t know if the model would work in the NBA. It very well might not – very few NBA teams employ PSLs at all. Part of the reason is the long season. NFL teams, with only 8 home games per year, sell most (if not all) of their tickets in the form of season tickets. Fewer people are willing to commit to buying tickets to 41 games of basketball a year.
Seattle is a little bit more unique however, because of the business interests in the area. Corporate juggernauts like Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing, and Starbucks would likely purchase a fair amount of these PSLs for their use in entertaining clients. The potential for them to work in Seattle, even in an NBA arena, is higher than in most cities.
It doesn’t seem like any other route is realistic, so why not fill a stadium with PSLs to help finance it? Of course, the currently non-existent Seattle team’s owner would be the one to commission these licenses, which is a bit of a problem. Even though PSLs would likely price out some ordinary fans and make it harder to get tickets to games, they represent another creative method to finance an arena for NBA and NHL teams in Seattle.
What do you think? Would you be willing to sacrifice your ability to attend games in order to raise the chances of a team coming here? Are PSLs a good way to help build a stadium? Let us know in the comments.
