Peter King, America's most successful NFL reporter, wrote something ridiculous -- but not surprising -- about Giants owner John Mara in this week's Monday Morning Quarterback column on SI.com.
King noted that Mara is planning to force Giants season ticket holders to pay thousands of dollars for personal seat licenses if they want to keep their season tickets when the Giants move into a new stadium in two years. And in the process he made Mara sound like a martyr.
King wrote, "I feel for one owner here -- John Mara of the Giants." And he then proceeded to describe how he knows that Mara "is sick about what he knows he's going to have to do": Charge what King estimates will be an average of $25,000 per fan to at least 30,000 fans to buy personal seat licenses at the Giants' new stadium.
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That's right. King feels for Mara because Mara "is sick about" collecting $750 million (using King's estimate) from the fans. King then continues that Mara will feel so badly that "this is something that will keep him up nights."Here's a radical idea, if Mara doesn't want to charge season-ticket holders for personal-seat licenses: Don't. Simply don't do it. Continue operating the same way you've been operating, using the $100 million a year or so you get from your share of the NFL's TV contracts, plus all the other cash you bring in from the gate and merchandise and so on, and run your business without charging the fans for personal-seat licenses.
Did you feel sorry for Mara when he was making his millions without personal seat licenses? I suspect, if you're a typical fan, you didn't. But one of the differences between the typical fan and the reporters who cover sports is that reporters display an overly reverential attitude toward team owners, ascribing to them all sorts of qualities like generosity and great business acumen, even though many of them do everything they can to squeeze every last nickel out of the fans, and even though many of them (including Mara) own their teams not because of great business acumen but because their fathers and grandfathers were owners.
King doesn't think it's possible that Mara would charge the fans for seat licenses as anything other than a last resort. He writes, "in this climate, with the economy being what it is, the Giants and Jets will both have to." But that really isn't true. The economy itself is in a slowdown, but NFL revenues are continuing to grow. And the Yankees and the Mets are both building new stadiums in New York and doing so without selling personal seat licenses.
Obviously, Mara isn't charging the fans for personal seat licenses because he has to, he's doing it because he's a businessman, in business to make money, and he knows perfectly well that the majority of Giants season-ticket holders will pay whatever he charges in order to keep their season tickets.
Similarly, the Yankees and Mets aren't declining to sell personal seat licenses out of some sense of moral rectitude, they're doing it because, the Mets' executive vice president of business operations told Bloomberg News, market research indicated that "it would not be well received by our fan base."
Personal seat licenses have been around since the Carolina Panthers sold them before they entered the NFL as an expansion team in 1995. They're neither good nor bad; they're simply another way that NFL owners get rich from the football-loving American public. But please, spare us the sob stories about how bad those team owners feel as they get rich off us.
Anyway, the issue here is less about personal seat licenses than it is about the way the sports media give owners more credit than they deserve. It's strange the way team owners are praised for philanthropy when they donate a relative pittance to charity, or for wisdom when they do nothing more than inherit a profitable business and keep it profitable. Owners are almost always described in more favorable terms than athletes, even though athletes had to prove themselves on the field of play to get where they are, while many owners are utterly untested.
Sports fans would get much more insightful coverage if the sports media took a more skeptical view of team owners. As far as owners are concerned, their teams are businesses, and they're in the business of making money. Why is it so hard for so many members of the sports media to understand that?
Maybe we need more sports reporters whose background is in business journalism. I'm sure oil company executives would claim they feel the same way about high gas prices that King thinks Mara feels about personal seat licenses: Of course, those oil executives would say, they feel terrible about making record profits while gas prices reach record highs. The difference is that no business reporter would ever be naive enough to believe them.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
4-02-2008 @ 7:47AM
Elsquare said...
Absolutely beautiful report! Two thoughts: 1) Why is Keter Ping considered the most successful NFL reporter? Does he have the largest income? Is he the most insightful? and 2) This is America. Supply and demand. We have a congress that could eliminate anti-trust protection, scuttle the NFL draft and generally level the playing field (I can't believe I just wrote that) Then each franchise would sink or swim on the basis of competing fairly in a free market system. The athlletles apply for a job and they are hired , or not hired, on the basis of the value of their services. That is the way it works for you and Keter Ping.
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4-02-2008 @ 8:10AM
brianc said...
By far the best article written here in a
long time. With the FDIC guarantee limit,
his hands are bound to cramp up opening 7500
banks accounts with $100,000 in each. Almost Super
Terrific Happy Hour like.
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4-02-2008 @ 12:13PM
Pacifist Viking said...
Interesting stuff, MDS, and I pretty much agree with you. But I would like to quibble with you on a point. You call for a more balanced approach to assessing owners. Have you thought about the ways you contribute to an unbalanced portrayal of players?
You generally write the Fanhouse post when atletes get into off the field trouble (or merely get accused of off the field trouble). Does that contribute to the unbalanced, negative image we have of athletes? Now, I know you also do posts when athletes do good things, or turn their lives around after past errors. That's a good thing, and I'd like to see more of that.
You also write at Pro Football Talk, a site that appears to take great pleasure in reporting on and criticizing athletes for off the field behavior. PFT does not offer a balanced view of athletes at all: the rumor mill is hypercritical of athletes, focuses on a lot of the bad things athletes do, and rarely mentions any of the good things athletes do. Is PFT also partly responsible for the unbalanced view of athletes?
I agree completely with this post: let's put more incisive analysis on NFL owners to give a balanced view of things. But let's also balance out the portrayals of athletes, too: the negative things athletes do get a lot more attention than the positive things athletes do, including from you and from sites you write for.
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4-02-2008 @ 1:03PM
TM said...
Actually the reason the Mets and Yankees are not doing PSL's in political.
From biz of baseball:
Also, government officials may not react favorably where a team owner seeks to introduce PSL's at a new facility that has also received substantial public funding. These are two key reasons why neither the New York Mets nor Yankees plan to require the purchase of PSL's for their new stadia.
Yankee stadium along is costing taxpayers $833 million. Quite a sense of moral rectitude right there...
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4-02-2008 @ 2:42PM
JCN said...
@ Pacifist Viking: If you look at MDS's coverage of, say, Andy Reid, you can see that he has the same excellent coverage of folks in management positions. But balancing the coverage is impossible: There are simply more athletes to report on.
TM: I think the political hell they would catch is directly calculated in the research the NY MLB teams did.
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4-02-2008 @ 8:17PM
gfan said...
I totally agree with the main point of this article, that sports writers in general are too in love with the athlete/coaches/owners they cover. I had the same reaction when I first read King's column.
But as TM alluded to, the new home of the Super Bowl Champion New York Giants was funded privately. I don't know the specifics of the Giants' finances, but it's reasonable to assume new revenue sources are needed to meet their debt obligations and maintain profitability.
As a fan and a taxpayer, I find this arrangement highly preferable for 2 reasons. First, the added financial burden is on fans of the team, not the population in general. Second, Giants' season tickets that aren't renewed will be available to new fans. NYG tickets have a waiting list second only to Green Bay-- it's not uncommon for holders to leave tickets in their wills for generations.
When the GMen make it two in a row this year, the team won't have any trouble filling those seats.
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4-03-2008 @ 9:03AM
juggernaut said...
To say nothing of Dan Rooneys remarks last week about wife/spouse beatings...
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4-03-2008 @ 10:51AM
SlickBomb said...
::slow claps::
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4-03-2008 @ 10:58PM
George B Vieto said...
John Mara makes Nick Saban request that LSU Tiger fans pay top dollar for their seats at Tiger Stadium during Nick's tenure look tame by comparison.
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4-07-2008 @ 7:46AM
Jim in CT said...
Guys wake up according to a NY Post article a while back and what has already been charged, the price is going to be more like $5,000 per seat not $500.
Also to top it all off businesses can probably write them off.
We should really get after the politicians. Right now tickets can be written off at 50% of face value. So most Jets tickets can get a $55 write off if bought by a corporation.
If every ticket was bought by a corporation and the corporation had a 33% tax bracket it amounts to almost a 2 million dollar subsidy from the federal government per game.
While their are not that many, I bet you are looking at minimum 10,000 are business tickets.
10K * $55 *.33 = $181,500 the fed is paying per game to drive us little guys out of taking our families to a game.
Multiply that by 10 games at home. 1.8 million now by how many teams, by how many sports.......
Not only sports, but concerts and everything.
This is hundreds of millions a year maybe even billions a year.
Take away the deductions. We are subsidizing driving ourselves out of being able to take our families to a game.
If businesses want the tickets, then pay and get no deduction.
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