People love to watch their premier players at live sporting events. However, the world is much more expensive now than a year ago. As a result, people are changing their spending habits and not necessarily how you might think.
Spending on consumer goods is way down, but spending on experiences is way up. People saw the world shut down into a place where experiences that had been easy to pass over as “we will do it next time” suddenly didn’t have a foreseeable next time. This means that the demand for live sports – for those premier players that make it easy to take your mind off of money worries or general anxiety for a few hours – is surging.
Sports economics professors saw this coming. According to Dennis Coates, a sports economics guru from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, sports are typically “unresponsive to price changes.” He went on to note how regardless of “good times, bad times, high prices – it doesn’t change consumers’ behavior.”
In the last pre-pandemic, pre-inflation year, the average price for an NFL ticket was $258 in 2019, and those exact tickets were $307 after the release of the league schedule this season. Tickets are expensive, but so are items at the sporting event where the premier players are strutting their stuff. The price of one single beer at the PGA Championship – admittedly a high-end event in a world of high-end events – was $18 earlier this week. Fans want to add to their experience, and after paying $X for a ticket, they are more than willing to buy one beer for the price of a 12-pack at a grocery store.
People are definitely taking the work hard, play hard approach when it comes to sporting events. One NBA fan talked of paying $1,200 for three tickets to the NBA playoffs between the Boston Celtics and the Brooklyn Nets. The general theory is that a fan can always make more money – even if that means picking up a side hustle – but experiences are everything. Fans want to be part of a winning culture, part of a crowd after so long while crowds were nowhere to be seen. As a result, they will pay what could be seen as over the odds for those experiences.
This is a trend reflected outside the world of premier players and sporting events as well. Travel – both domestically and internationally – is up massively on pre-pandemic levels. We live in a world where people want to experience everything they can – often in families or with a group – and other things are being put on the back burner to make such experiences possible.
The best advice given by one fan was, “work to live, don’t live to work.” The Memorial Day weekend has gone, and the unofficial start of summer is here. Fans don’t have to flock to MLB stadiums to get a fan experience that will stay in the money (but you could). Finding a fun minor league baseball, local indoor soccer, or even a rec ultimate Frisbee league will still make for a fun and relaxed summer evening.
Finding ways to attend sporting events will lift your mood, and it will give you a zest for life that some of us may have lost during the last couple of years.
Article by Premier Players Steve Wright