Let me first say that I’ve always felt analyzing Arena Revenues on the success of a franchise is just part of the financial picture & can be shortsighted. Arena Revs are important and it is largely reported that NHL relies on their Arena Gate revenue much more than other professional sports leagues. My point about the Gate Revenues is that it takes time and generations to develop a fan base that creates excess demand to allow for owners to increase prices. So when you hear of crazy cheap prices and promotions in other cities, this should be considered a good thing and part of the process in developing a fan base. Besides, isn’t cheap tickets a good thing to make hockey more accessible to people of all income levels?
Additionally, the NHL should be doing things to diversify their dependence on Gate Revenues. My analysis of the Forbes NHL Valuations from last year showed that 50% of Canadian Team revenues comes from Gate Revenue where most of the other teams are somewhere closer to 33%. With roughly 50% of NHL franchises selling out every game this year, higher prices and therefore higher gate revenues are surely coming. The unfortunate thing here is that teams don’t have much of a choice but to raise the prices because they will be sold on the secondary market for higher prices should they try to keep prices low.
Ok…thank you for letting me get that out of my system
Seattle revenues at KeyArena
I’ve seen a lot of banter over the last few days on the limited capacity in the KeyArena and the impacts to Arena Gate Revenue. There is a lot of concern that because of the small arena, it isn’t suitable for the NHL, even temporarily.
Key Arena seats only 11,000 for hockey? Uh, hockey-related revenues anyone? http://t.co/v8XNaHK3MG
— adater (@adater) June 18, 2013
Seatless in Seattle #keyarena
— Nick Cotsonika (@cotsonika) June 16, 2013
So I decided to look at the price points of the various I apologize for stating the obvious here but there are two elements to Arena Revenue: attendance and ticket prices. Again with the obvious, in order to make up for lost capacity, one can raise the price of tickets. With the added scarcity of tickets this shouldn’t be too hard to do.
I looked at the average attendance per game in 2013 and the average ticket price per team to get at a “projected gate revenue per game” for each team. For the most part, you can assume that the lower the ticket price, the lower the attendance. The loan exception is Tampa Bay who has the 2nd lowest average ticket price but the 8th highest average attendance per game. Ottawa is another anomaly with the 6th lowest ticket price per game but the 6th highest average attendance per game. Even with that high attendance, they rank the 6th and 7th lowest in gate revenue per game. Here is a graph of what the Seattle NHL Team would need to charge to raise the equivalent in Gate Revenues for each team.
Note there are two figures that are being compared against the team averages. One price point at 11,000 people and one at 13,000. The 11K figure is popularly reported but Chris Daniels for Channel 5 in Seattle had done some investigating and noted that the figure is around 13K. Important to note that this assumes that all games sell out in KeyArena, regardless of capacity. I don’t recall how some other markets did when playing in a temp facility but it might be a little naïve to think that they could sell out every game.
Here are my findings:
- Assuming a sellout of 13K, the Seattle NHL Franchise would need to charge an average of $43.18 to bring in the same gate revenues that Phoenix is brining in at $40 per ticket. 43.18 would be the 6th cheapest ticket in the league.
- Conversely they would need to charge $186.33/seat to bring in what the Toronto MapleLeafs bring in at the gate per night. (I know not realistic but kind of fun to look at.)
- If the Seattle team charged the league average of $61 per seat they would make more than 6 teams do today at the gate.
- At $50 a seat, they would be charging the 12th lowest ticket price in the league and still generate more than 4 other teams.
Those are just some fun stats and thoughts to look when it relates to gate revenue. There are things like variable pricing per game where the team could charge a premium: Vancouver, Pittsburgh, Boston, Detroit, & Chicago draw extremely well on the road.
Let me know if you have other scenarios and I will run them against my model.