It's been over a month since I've posted anything on this blog. And while I'm still trying to recover from what has to be one of the most disappointing seasons of my 19 year run as a season ticket holder, I have some things to say to wrap up this season and move on to the next, which hopefully starts with a lucky result in next Tuesday's draft lottery. We can always hope, right?
For the past five years on this blog, I've written an end of season post comparing the cost of Wizards season tickets to the cost of tickets on the secondary market based on my weekly tracking of season ticket prices on StubHub. This year I'm not doing that. Instead I'm just going to write about my own personal experience owning and selling Wizards season tickets in two locations in the building (Sections 109 and 415). And yes, I know the title of this post is now wrong.
I'm changing my reporting here for two reasons. First, I just couldn't be bothered to track this data every month or every week. It's just too much effort for a team that didn't exhibit much effort out on the court. Or in other words, I just don't have the data. Second, this is the first season since I've been tracking the value of my tickets that I've been underwater, where what I paid yielded less than the value of the dollars shelled out.
How do I measure that, you might ask? Here's how:
Let's say I have two pairs of tickets to a Wizards game: one in Section 109 which cost me $192 (2 tickets at $96 each) and one in Section 415 which cost me $80 (2 tickets at $40 each). Let's say I manage to sell my upper deck tickets for $28 and use the other two to go to the game. The value of that game for me is $192 because that's the cost of the seats that I am actually sitting in. I only recovered $56 on the two tickets I sold so therefore my cost for $192 of value is $216, meaning I took a $24 loss.
I track every game like that for the entire year and then measure whether I won or lost money on the season. Every season I have tracked this, my value has been equal to or slightly greater than my cost, except this year when I took a loss of $307.
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| The month of March 2019. Possibly the most disastrous month ever from a Wizards value standpoint. |
How did this happen, you might ask? Well broadly speaking and without citing any specific facts for now, the bottom fell out of the Wizards ticket market this year when the bottom fell out of the season, which happened in like November. Honestly, unless you wanted to go see the Warriors or Lakers games, this season's tickets were available for cheap (and certainly less than season ticket holders paid for them) on the secondary market. Too much supply and little demand. Folks lost interest in this season pretty quickly when the team started underperforming worse than they usually do to start a season. No winning, no attendance. Not this year.
Now for some specifics:
- This year I sat in my Section 415 seats just four times, meaning I sold or tried to sell 36 regular season games (the Wiz only had 40 home games this year due to the Londan game being a home game) and three preseason games. My total cost for those 39 games was $3,320. My return on trying to sell those tickets got me $1,492. These things have no value most games. The team selling them at $40 per regular season seat is far, far above market value.
- There were just eight games this year where I sold tickets for more than I paid in Section 109 (Houston, Boston, the Lakers, Philadelphia, Golden State, Milwaukee, Miami and San Antonio). In the upper deck, that number dropped to five (the Lakers, Toronto, Golden State, Miami and Boston).
- There were six games in the upper deck that I couldn't sell at all, not even for $5 to me and a cost of $7 to the buyer. That means that there was nobody willing to buy my seats for a lousy $7. $7!!!! The six games by the way were Orlando, the Clippers, Charlotte, Sacramento, Orlando again and Utah.
- I took a trip out of the country in March and had to miss the first six games of that month which unfortunately for me were not very sell-able. My cost for these six games? $1,632. My return via selling on the secondary market? $594.50. That's a loss of $1,037.50 over a two week period.
- I sold my lower level seats to the Orlando game on March 13 (which was one of the six games in the bullet above) for $25 each, a loss of $71 per seat.
- The overall numbers would have been way worse if it wasn't for the Miami game on March 23 and the Boston game on April 9. I actually made money on the Miami game just because (in all likelihood) it was Dwyane Wade's last game in D.C. In all likelihood refers to the reason I likely sold at a profit, not the likelihood it was Wade's last game in Washington. And the Boston game? Some fool paid me $60 per ticket for my upper deck seats only to be at a game where the entire roster of the Celtics sat out to rest for the postseason.
This is not a good set of stats for the Wizards season ticket holder.
To the Wizards' credit, I guess, they elected not to raise season ticket prices this year. I am sure the team has a lot of data similar to what I've presented above and I'm pretty positive they had lots of anecdotal information about how angry a good portion of the season ticket holder base was and is about the state of the franchise. Raising ticket prices would have been suicide, even with the firing of Ernie Grunfeld out there.
I also appreciate the fact that the team allowed me to renew my lower level tickets, which all things considered could sell pretty well (except in March of 2019) most nights, and not renew my seats in Section 415 which are nothing short of extortion on the part of the team. Unless the team goes deep into the playoffs for the next few seasons (which is unlikely) I see no way those seats returning the value to the people who buy them. They should drop the prices on those things. And fast.
I've had some pretty good years getting value out of my season tickets. The discount provided to season tickets have helped some years tremendously but the real value has come through season ticket holder benefits like the Monumental Rewards Program (now gone) and the Fluid Tickets Program (not gone but completely useless). I renewed my season tickets for three reasons this year: (1) next year is my 20th season and it's a nice round number, (2) some seasons I've attended a lot of games pretty cheaply so I'm OK overpaying for a couple of years at the end (that's such a terrible attitude by the way) and (3) maybe the team will win the draft lottery and tickets will become valuable again. I'll be watching next week for sure.
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