by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
Driven by a winning team and ticket prices that are among the league’s lowest, sellouts are starting to replace blackouts during Jacksonville Jaguars home games. But owner Wayne Weaver said Thursday that ticket prices will have to climb eventually to keep the team competitive.
Weaver told the Jacksonville Bar Association during its Thursday luncheon that the bargain ticket prices were part of a complex financial cocktail that keeps the team’s revenue figures among the National Football League’s lowest.
Jaguars Chief Financial Officer Bill Prescott has projected this season’s ticket revenues to finish at or near the league low. Even with sellouts becoming the trend at Alltel Stadium, the team’s ticket revenue stream is a trickle compared to a flood in the league’s largest markets, said Weaver.
The Jaguars’ skyboxes sell for $70,000 to $130,000 per season, while teams in New York and Boston sell theirs for up to $300,000, said Weaver. His club seats sell for $1,500 to $2,000 while the same seats in New England’s Gillette Stadium sell for $5,000.
Weaver doesn’t expect prices for his high-end seats to ever reach the league leaders. Jacksonville’s market simply won’t support prices that high, he said. But he said he hopes to bring all his ticket prices up to the league’s median. That means increases at nearly every level of ticket.
Weaver said he didn’t want to speculate about the amounts he’s targeting nor on a timetable for how increases might be phased in. But in his comments to the JBA, Weaver said his $43 seats in the general bowl sell $20 short of the league’s $63 average for comparable tickets. The $25 seats in the upper bowl are a bargain even compared to the same tickets in the league’s bottom six markets, which sell for $47, he said.
“We can’t sell our suites for $300,000. Jacksonville’s a service-based economy and we can’t compete in those areas,” said Weaver. “But we can get seat prices to the league median. It will take us a long time to get there.”
The comparatively low ticket prices in the league’s small markets are helping to spread the divide between the NFL’s haves and have-nots, said Weaver. The top eight grossing teams in the league ride increased advertising and ticket revenue to average gross revenues of $260 million annually, he said. The bottom eight teams, meanwhile, are earning $130 million a year.
Although the league divides 80 percent of those revenues equally in accordance with the league’s revenue-sharing plan, the disparity still gives the top teams more money to spend on players. That increased competitiveness on the field translates to an ability to charge even more for advertising and ticket prices.
“It’s not hard to project the current arrangement out five or six years and see there’s no way teams in the bottom half can compete for players,” said Weaver.
It’s a scenario Weaver hopes to avoid by pressing for changes to the league’s collective bargaining agreement. Weaver hopes to convince the top-tier teams to push more revenue into the league’s collective pot for redistribution to the small markets.