Giants, Take Your Personal Seat License and…

This post doesn’t have a lot to do directly with sports marketing. But it does have to do with a lot of ticked off Giants fans who were hoping to some day get a hold of elusive season tickets. Then again, sports marketing shouldn’t be about alienating the fans who bleed blue for your team and spend their hard-earned money on your merchandise.

But the New York Giants have done that, with their new stadium they will co-own with the Jets in 2010 that has left many old-school season ticket holders (like my family) unable to keep their seats, and many more people who were on the waiting list (like me) unable to afford what was once the best ticket in town.

And what has it all boiled down to? The Giants may not be able to sell out their new stadium. And this is a team that was selling out games when they were the laughing stock of the NFL, and have sold out every game since the current Giants Stadium opened.

Here’s more from Newsday beat writer Neil Best. According to his column, the Giants are even in denial that they are having a hard time selling Personal Seat Licenses, the very thing that will keep the Parry family off the season ticket list since well before I was born.

Corporate greed at its finest. Why sell tickets to real fans when you can make even more money off the high society? Who cares if they know anything about the team, if you make season ticket blocks available to Madison Ave.? Those corporations will buy them up!

Unless of course a recession hits. And it did.

In a way, I’m glad I can’t afford either the low end $5,000 or upper-end $20,000 per seat for the PSL just for the right to buy season tickets, which will also jump up in price.

For one final season, my family will be able to cheer for Big Blue in Section 132, Row 13, Seats 15 to 18. That’s an area that’s now going for $20,000 per PSL. And those tickets are going to cost $700 each.

In 1979, when I went to see the Giants play the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, those seats went for $9 each.

Good luck finding people to fill those seats, Giants. I’ll sit home and watch them on television… unless the games are blacked out because you can no longer sell your games out.