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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

opinion

COLUMN: Fans deserve to come first

John Norworth wrote “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” in 1908, when the ballpark was a place where one could enjoy themself, regardless of the numbers in their bank account.

Today, spectator sports as Norworth knew them would be utterly unrecognizable. Traditional stadiums have been replaced with futuristic ones that command eye-popping sums to build. In business and in sports, firms or franchises pass these costs onto customers to some degree.

For example, the NFL’s MetLife Stadium, which cost $1.6 billion, charges nearly $9 for a beer. Tickets to Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis topped out at $1,200, a ridiculous figure considering $12 could buy admission to Super Bowl I in 1967.

Progressive franchises like the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons are rightly returning the focus to the fan, without whom their businesses couldn’t exist.

Last Monday, owner Arthur Blank unveiled Mercedes-Benz Stadium’s “fan-first menu,” which features $2 soft-drinks with unlimited refills and $5 domestic beers.

It’s refreshing to see teams adopting a fan-centric perspective. The Philadelphia 76ers have no business charging fans $8.50 for a beer. It’s an extremely disloyal move to the same group that has shown them the utmost loyalty, buying tickets to watch a team that ownership has scraped off the bottom of the NBA’s talent barrel.

While the Falcons are doing their part, they are still an outlier relative to their fellow franchises. While the business world has more or less accepted the unsavory, exploitative strategies of old are ineffective and unethical, the realm of professional sports lags far behind.

In February, New York Yankees chief operating officer Lonn Trost defended the team’s decision to disallow fans to print tickets at home.

Stemming from a beef with ticket giant StubHub, the move encourages people to instead use the team’s official ticket exchange, which uses a price floor to ensure tickets are not sold at prices below a certain threshold.

In his defense, Trost puzzlingly eluded to print-at-home tickets creating an unwanted intermingling of social classes. “The fan may be someone who has never sat in a premium location,” he said. “So that’s a frustration to our existing fan base.”

The arrogant air of Trost’s comments exposes a belief many sports execs might hold but not speak on. In the relatively inelastic market for professional sports, fans will splurge for the seats, as evidenced by the crowd of 71,088 at this year’s Super Bowl.

They’ll probably even buy food, even if it is exorbitantly priced. Executives like Trost see fans as dollar signs and commas rather than the individuals who pay his salary, albeit indirectly.

Don’t be fooled into thinking Blank’s decision is a purely humanitarian one. The team stands to make a lot of money on concessions, their margins will just be smaller.

But whereas it was one-sided, with fans being shaken down and execs profiting handsomely, it’s now a win-win. Fans get to enjoy low-priced food and teams are still profiting.

Now that sounds like something Norworth could get behind.

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