Season Tickets or Car Payment?

I’ve never been much of a sports fan. Yeah as a kid I played baseball and football with my friends in the neighborhood, yes we played in the street and it was safe and fun. It was a game so of course it was fun but later on in life when my mom and dad insisted that I go to baseball camp during the summer it stopped being so much fun. Because while at the camp for the majority of the summer the coaches there tried to imbed into my thinking that the point of the game was to win, to support your teammates, and of course to hustle. Hustle, huh that word brings so much more meaning to the game now than fun ever did.


Team owners nowadays are doing their best to hustle in their attempts to separate game fans with their money. From selling team jerseys to hats to bobble-head dolls that kind of look like a player teams are selling merchandise for multi-million dollar profits every year, and yet they still want public assistance to build new stadiums. New stadiums are popping up like wild flowers all across the country these days, bigger and better stadiums that can accommodate more and more fans to come watch their favorite teams do battle against rivals from far and near. These new stadiums have everything these days including wireless Internet access, misting stations to cool down under on hot days, and even restaurant franchises. All within the same building and most likely from all of which the teams get a percentage of profits or in the least there is a lease agreement of some kind involved. So even with all the money they make from merchandise and all the money from public grants from cities and even states to help build these stadiums team owners feel the need to raise the price of tickets. It is not unknown for tickets to cost at the minimum of $100/seat in even the mediocre rated sections of the stadium, a support pylon or even a bundle of camera wires might block some of your view. What is worse is that even lifetime season ticket holders, who paid a flat fee long ago for tickets every year, must now pay new charges since their tickets were for the old stadium and not for the team itself as they saw it when they purchased them originally. Not only do they have to pay again, but also pay more and in some cases they have to pay thousands of dollars just to have the “privilege” of paying even more money for new season tickets. At one stadium the price of season tickets has gone up an average of over $50/seat and since most season ticket holders have more than one ticket the price they have to pay goes up immensely. Many people see this as a way of making viewing a sports event something that only the rich are able to do on a regular basis since the price of tickets can now sometimes run the price of a mortgage payment. Businesses have long used sporting events as a way of courting clients or rewarding employees and now many of the small businesses, the backbone of the American economy are finding it harder to continue to do business this way and will more than likely lose out on clients to the bigger companies who can afford to treat buyers and investors to a free game and food.


Players also are doing their best to hustle to try and get money from the team owners for their abilities. These days it is not unusual to see an athlete sign a multi-million dollar contract to play for a team, yes I said “play” because after all their job is a game. You don’t work at a game you play, if I could work at a game then the gold pieces I have in my online games should be taken as payment for my rent and food bills. But alas this is not to be, apparently only certain games can you get paid for. I admit that these players practice and train and strive to be the best they can in their game but they still just play a game. For the most part many of them have played these games since they were kids, just like kids all across the world, but they made the decision or it was made for them that they would play a game for a living. They were drafted to their professional team right out of their college team which before that convinced them to play for their college team. All through their lives many of these players were handed rewards and incentives for what they did during game time; whether it was a passing grade, expensive new clothes, jewelry, or even a new car they were being paid in some way or form for their actions. Yes if any of that happened before they were a part of a professional team it would have been not only unethical but illegal, but rarely has anyone been called out for something like this since most people are sports fans and are even such intense fans that they wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize their teams abilities to be successful. As wrong as this may seem it is done at every level in every form of employment from athletes to pizza delivery and from clergy to bank financiers. It isn’t like you can really blame these players for wanting huge contracts to play for a team, they know that their actions are what is going to bring fans to the stadiums and get them to buy merchandise to fatten the wallets of the team owners so they just want a piece of the pie for their part.


So in my opinion there should be a salary cap for every professionally played game, that way players can’t demand huge amounts in their contracts forcing the teams to raise prices to cover the wage of a single player. On the other hand I don’t think it’s fair that teams can tap into municipal funds to pay for a stadium either. They make enough money as it is that it is not fair to ask taxpayers to pay for their new constructions as well as pay a higher cost for tickets. One or the other not both, if they want to pay out of their own pocket for their new stadium then yes they should be allowed to raise ticket prices. However if they want taxpayers to pay higher sales taxes or get less municipal projects done all to help pay for a stadium that not all of them will go to, since not everyone is a hometown fan and some people actually work on game days, then they should keep their ticket prices low so that these fans can still afford to attend a game. But there actually is a third option here, it has happened in other places where a team built a new stadium with the help of public funds but were required to also build other amenities to the community they built in. These included not just a new stadium for fans to come and be comfortable in but also parks, sporting venues for local school teams, parks with public game areas, and also road improvements to offset the heavy traffic that is sure to occur on game days. Now this isn’t supposed to turn you off from going to watch a game or watching it on television, this is just my usual ranting on a random subject that irks me. So don’t throw empty beer bottles or dump your nacho cheese on me, recycle the bottles and eat the nachos. Or you can leave the nachos and I’ll eat them for you, mmmmm cheese.