Subdued Dull Sunday

As I was leaving after tutoring a student last night, I asked him if he was going to watch the Super Bowl this weekend. He said maybe. When I asked him who he wanted to win he said, “The Cowboys, if they’re still in it.”

Now, I’m not about to claim I can tell you who played in every Super Bowl, or even the winners of the last five. But when an eighth grade guy wants a team to win that didn’t even make the playoffs, the NFL has a big problem. It doesn’t take an advanced marketing degree to tell that teenage adult males should be a major demographic for the NFL – in the regular season! The Super Bowl used to transcend demographics. When I was growing up in Chicago, there was even a nun known for predicting who would win.

Where did the enthusiasm go?

The NFL is forgetting about the most important consumer – Joe the fan. Ticket prices to NFL games – or any pro game these days – are rising faster than the stock market is falling. Fans attending the game drive all other sources of revenue. TV? If the deadline for selling out the tickets hadn’t been extended, the Detroit Lions Thanksgiving day game wouldn’t have even gone on the air. Merchandise? Who wants to wear the jersey of perceived sellouts who play in stadiums full of only CEOs and company presidents? Corporate sponsors? What good are billboards in the stadium if only nobody comes to see them? Heck, companies won’t even buy ad time if the games get blacked out.

Even though you might technically get a better view of the game on a flat-screen TV than from the cheap – well, less expensive seats, there’s an amount of loyalty that being there creates. When I was growing up, my family never had season tickets or even great seats, but I was almost always lucky enough to go to a game or two at Wrigley Field. Sometimes it’d even be a standing room only ticket to squeeze in against the fence, but I was there, burning in the sun, hearing vendors yell “Peanuts,” and seeing Sammy Sosa run out to right field and way to the fans – and he was waving to me. Yes, me and every other fan in the bleachers, but anyone can tells you talking to someone on a webcam is different than communicating with them in person.

No amount of number crunching marketing geniuses can calculate the importance of giving all fans a chance to attend games in person on the bottom line. I suspect that if you broke down the number of games fans of different incomes were able to attend, it would look similar to the wealth distribution – the richest 10% of fans make of 80% of ticket sales. The bottom 50% - maybe 5% percent of the tickets, and as the economy worsens, that number is going to shrink and the number of diehard fans are going to plummet as well.

In previous years, ads would be sold out by Thanksgiving. This year, there’s still airtime left. Are you kidding? I’ve never even heard of another event that people dislike but will watch anyway just to see the commercials. Yes, the tickets have sold out, but a number of the pregame parties have been cancelled. General Motors, a major, longtime sponsor of the NFL dropped their annual event. Bah, its just a bunch of old car dealers, right? Think again – even Playboy’s Super Bowl party was cancelled. While some may think this beneficial, the trend is certainly not. And unless teams remember where their revenue ultimately comes from, NFL games stands won’t have too many more fans than a Pop Warner game.