Season Ticket Holder? Go somewhere else.

By: Herschel | September 22nd, 2009

I caught this story from one of the Big Soccer forums and thought it was worth looking into. I’ve always been a big supporter of a team’s loyalty to its fans, regardless of the sport and I hate it when they get screwed.

In this era where the MLS struggles to grow its fan base; where we can stay home and watch superb soccer on 4 different channels; and where the only way that soccer as a sports league will survive in this country is with the passion of its fans, teams need to be very careful on how they treat those who visit their stadiums. I understand that soccer is a business like the NFL, like MLB, but truth be told they are starting as a business and cannot alienate neither the 35%-45% loyal fans that are season ticket holders, nor the rest of either pure soccer lovers or casual family who knows a bit about the sport and are looking for a nice family outing. As far as I know MLS teams do not have a list of thousands of people waiting on season tickets (maybe Seattle but not to that extent).

The story that I am adding below happened last Saturday to a Wizards Season Ticket Holder (STH) for General Admissions (GA). I believe STHs, regardless of where the buy their tickets should be treated equally, since most of the time their choice of seats is a reflection of what they can afford in relation to the amount of family members that will take part in the activity. To discriminate or mistreat people because they have tickets of a lower category is shameless and petty. That being said and to give you and idea of where they sit, the GA tickets at the CAB are either at the Berm or might end up behind home plate since few people sit there because of the location and the baseball net. Berm tickets are great for families with kids who usually get an itch after being in their seat more than 25 minutes and they have some space to run and move around.

I am posting this story because I believe the Wizards mishandled this situation horribly. If they were to give a corporation tickets they should have been for a certain section or with certain seat numbers and be done with it, not cordon off a large part of the berm (which is where most GA fans go to anyway), that actually remained almost empty (embarrassing in my opinion), and denied other ticket holders access to it. Come on. we know that the President of the Corporation wasn’t going to GA anyway, and he’s the big money man, so why not allow the few corporation fans that did come, to experience the game next to the Wizards faithful.

Sorry Wizards, I have to say you screwed this one up. Here’s the story.

I brought my three week old daughter, wife, my brother in law and his four year old son along to the Wizard’s game this weekend. My little girl aside it was my brother in laws first time at the Wizards and as somebody who was excited about the plan to build a stadium at Legends was happy to hear I could trade in unused season ticket to get him and his son into the game.

A family of five, and after talking about how great the Wizards are to their fans and how we enjoy our cheap seats on the Berm we arrived and within a minute I was infuriated. The remaining two thirds had been securely fenced off for a Swiss Re (http://www.swissre.com/) staff members and us regular season ticket holders were no longer permitted into the area we had become accustomed to.

Only one third of the Berm was available and the fans that normally populate the Berm were forced to crush themselves into it or retreat to the worst seats in the house – those behind home plate … and a net! There was literally one place for us to sit down, we managed to only because we had a three week old infant with us and people made room the best they could. Meanwhile the Swiss Re people had what I can only describe as an embarrassing abundance of space.

The Wizards took a big fat crap on their fans and season ticket holders this weekend. The message? We don’t give a ******** about the folk in the cheap seats – we don’t care about the families that bring children to the games and have chosen the Berm because it has space. They took what was supposed to be a General Admission area and made it private, changing the terms of our ticketing in the process and filled it with such an embarrassingly small number of people that they eventually took down the fencing and relieved the stewards at half time.

So there I was explaining to my brother in law that normally there is enough room to not sit cross legged and that the Wizards have just done something stupid when I just about exploded at the sight of a others I know from the Berm being turned away. I figured they might be feeling a bit more charitable but after talking to them I realize they were just as angry as I was.

• The Wizards resold space that is generally a General Admission area. I don’t really care if they underestimated the number of people that were planning on attending the game or not – the point was people who bought a ticket to sit on the Berm probably arrived to find they did not have a spot. Sitting behind home plate is only good when its raining … if you sold season tickets for that area exclusively they would not sell any.
• General Admission is first come first served. Not the Wizards selling 65% of the space and everybody else fighting over the scraps from Swiss Re’s table.
• The Swiss Re people barely turned out (surprise surprise) and ultimately the Wizards did open their mostly unused areas just before half time. This wasn’t out of concern for the regular fans – if the Swiss Re people loaded the areas with people we would have been out of luck and out of space.
• If they had done this to the guys on the Cauldron there would have been an absolute din made but I think they thought the Berm people would go down more quietly. This is the only reason that we can assume they did this to the folk on the Berm …
• The Swiss Re people were not held to the same standards as the regular Berm fans – people were allowed to stand on the Berm during play. Presumably because they had room to run around and actually play with … throwing hoops and the like … I sh** you not …
• The security people turning away the regulars were really really rude!!

I really want to know why this happened? I appreciate the Wizards need to sell to groups – that its a business but damn, don’t sh** on your season ticket holders to do it. Don’t crap all over groups that bring kids with them. I also think we deserve to be told if this is going to happen again – seriously, people are going to be unceremoniously dumped out of the areas they bought tickets to I think we should know up front so we can stop the pretense they we are valued consumers and accept that at the cheapest ticket tier we just don’t count.

My wife was already mad about the a security staff run in earlier in the year and was already making noises about not wanting to come anymore. This killed it – she is flat out angry, which means when work is done and the weekend roles around and I have to choose between spending time with my daughter and wife or the Wizards then I just might not bother with a ticket either.

Bottom line is it seasons Swiss Re and whatever they paid trumped loyalty to the fans. A lot of kids collect autographs on the Berm and they were just excluded for some freaking corporation … lame.

Do you want to see how full the Swiss Re area was? Here’s a picture of the overflow of company fans.

By the way, Sam Pierron, who actually works with the Wizards answered the complaint by stating that the STH have advantages that regular fans don’t have, and to that I say “bravo”, but Sam, you don’t start your defense by saying:

The truth is, we net less on a GA season ticket holder than we do someone who walks up and buys 4 stadium seats for a single game (depending on your accounting, you could say 3, but I’ll be a bit narrower).

BOOOO Mr. Pierron, it’s a business, and if you weren’t making money, the props and scarves and the advantages to bring more STH to the team would be non existent. STHs are an important stat that help get advertising, investments and net the team more money. Why would companies want to advertise their products in a half empty stadium?

You might make more money from the family of 3 that shows up to the game, but how many really do? Unless Chivas USA and the Chicago Fire with their Mexican stars show up, what is announced as a sellout seems to have a lot of empty seats, compared to the Santos Laguna Superliga game.

More respect for the Season Ticket Holder who pays in advance to watch the team he loves, and gets no money back when the team goes 3 months without a home win and 7 or 8 games scoring one goal.