By now, it appears inevitable that the NBA is headed for a lockout following the 2010-11 season, and the NFL may not fare any better during its labor negotiations. Major League Baseball always seems to be on the brink of labor strife, and the fallout from Kovalchuk-gate threatens to drive the NHL to a second straight labor impasse.
The athletes in these leagues who bristle at the thought of having their nine-figure contracts marginally lowered (the horror!) would do well to remember a simple adage: don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
Yes, it’s true that outside of Green Bay, Wis., professional sports franchise owners are a group of well-heeled millionaires (and in many cases, billionaires). But why, then, do so many leagues lament the fates of their “small-market” teams? You do the math. Compare the ticket revenues of a baseball team that draws three million fans annually to one that struggles to get a crowd of 15,000 every night. Factor in parking, concessions, and sales at the team store, and it’s easy to see the uneven economic playing field between the large` and small-market teams.
Thing is, those ticket revenues aren’t the foregone conclusion they used to be. As you may have noticed, the economy still isn’t in the greatest shape, and Economics 101 tells us that as unemployment rises, demand for luxuries—such as tickets to sporting events—goes down. Yet, in spite of this, ticket prices across the four major sports continue to rise. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to realize that this isn’t exactly a sustainable business model.
Let’s take a closer look at the NBA. Yours truly will celebrate his 23rd birthday on Jan. 17, 2011, and what better way to celebrate than by attending the Thunder-Lakers showdown that night and seeing the NBA’s two most dynamic scorers in person? It’s a done deal—as long as I’m willing to cough up $287 for a ticket.
That’s right. The average ticket price for that game is two hundred and eighty-seven dollars. Even scarier, that’s only the tenth-most expensive NBA ticket this season. Not surprisingly, the Heat-Lakers showdown on Christmas Day tops the list at—brace yourself—$893 a pop.
I think many SoCal youths would classify a ticket to December’s contest as the greatest Christmas gift they had ever received, or would ever receive. Yet, however much they want that ticket, $893 is probably going to put a pretty large dent in most Lakers’ fans’ wallets.
And yet this is the same league whose players object to any attempt to roll back their salaries. When teams have to charge $893 for a single-game ticket to pay your salary, something is out of whack. More to the point, most fans don’t have the financial wherewithal to cough up $893 forty-one times per season. You think your lives are so bad now that you have to live off a $20 million salary? Watch what happens if this trend continues and attendance plummets as a result—a result that seems to be almost a foregone conclusion if the model of higher prices in times of belt-tightening continues.
Everyone in the working world would like to make a higher salary, and when you consider how much money their leagues bring in annually, it’s perfectly understandable that even athletes making tens of millions of dollars a year would too. But the very people that the leagues rely on to pay these inflated salaries are the ones getting hurt the most. The NBA needs to follow in the NHL’s footsteps and roll back its players’ salaries to a reasonable level, and the NFL and MLB should take note. After all, aren’t professional sports supposed to be all about the fans?
Cohen is a member of the class of 2010, and the Sports Information Intern for Wesleyan University.
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