Next season, the New York Giants will move out of the Meadowlands and into a brand-new stadium that cost $1.6 billion and seats 82,500. The team hopes their new stadium will fill with fans every week, but it seems that the current state of the economy has other plans.
According to The New York Times, the Giants have not yet sold 3,000 club season tickets for next season. These tickets are all in prime locations and fetch top dollar.
Some of the most expensive seats in the new stadium are located in the Coaches Club behind the Giants’ bench. Each of these 2,093 seats command $20,000 for a personal seat license, which helps offset the stadium’s cost of construction, plus another $700 for 10 games. Four hundred of these premium seats have not been sold, in addition to 2,600 slightly less expensive club seats.
In the midst of a recession, it’s tough to sell these expensive seats.
“There is a point at some price that people won’t purchase a product,” Jim Lites, a senior sales consultant for the Giants, told the Times. “It’s still a bit of sticker shock. There has been some pushback on the price.”
Luxury suites, which seat between 12 and 26 spectators, have also been a hard sell. The most inexpensive suites, costing $150,000 per season, and the most expensive, which cost $500,000, have sold out, but the supply for those high-priced sections exceeds current demand.
“At the depths of the recession, it was not an opportune time to talk to people about a product like suites,” Mike Stevens, the Giants’ chief marketing officer, explained. “But in the last couple of weeks to a few months, receptivity levels have changed. We have a lot of agreements in the pipeline.”
The New York Jets, who will share the new stadium with the Giants, have not disclosed sales figures for tickets or suites. Jets executive vice president for business operations Matt Higgins is confident that, at least for his team, all tickets will be sold by the opening day of the 2010 season.
