Selling Stadium Seats

Everything old is new again.

Take the "new twist in stadium financing" which Megan Barnett is reporting on today. The idea is that the seats in the new Yankees Stadium will be sold in advance, to investors who will own them in perpetuity. Not only is this "a new way of raising money," says Barnett, but it's even been patented.

Um, can anybody say "prior art"? I can give you an example of exactly the same structure being used as long ago as the 1860s: the financing of the Royal Albert Hall, in London. Here's a few snippets from a long and very detailed history of the hall at British History Online:

One respect in which the hall as built was consonant with the Prince's ideas was in its financing by private rather than public money...
In August 1864, while on the train to Norwich, he wrote to tell Grey what he had decided. 'I have come to the conclusion that the only way to get the Memorial Hall done is to do it!' He had therefore determined to circulate a prospectus, appeal for subscribers himself, and then go to the Commissioners for a lease of the site. His idea was to sell sittings in the hall at £100 each: he had already sold three... What Cole in his resourcefulness was selling was... freehold sittings. This was to have very complicating consequences for the managers who later had to run the hall essentially on its box-office takings...
The hall was put in hand just before a rise in building costs, and with the aid also of thrifty management it was possible to announce at the opening that the hall had been built for about the estimated sum of £200,000. Or, if it did exceed that figure, it was not by an extravagant amount: the total cost was probably some £214,000...
In 1865 Cole had told Gladstone that the hall would be built without recourse to public funds. At the opening the Prince of Wales was able to state that this was so...
By the time the hall had been begun its friends and enemies were already drawing attention to the difficulty that would be found in inducing impresarios to take the hall when the best seats were already sold in virtual perpetuity. In 1877 the Commissioners' secretary said that the sales had been at too low a price, which should have been £150 instead of £100 per seat. There was no endowment fund, and with the running charges estimated by a hostile but accurate critic at £5,000 per annum the hall was launched on a virtually impossible task of at once maintaining itself and serving science and art.

Now I'm sure that someone has already worked out how to deal with similar problems in the case of Yankee Stadium. The team gets a lot of revenue from sources other than ticket sales, so George Steinbrenner can probably live with other people owning "his" seats. What's more, I don't think that the Yankee Stadium proposal envisages selling nearly as many seats in perpetuity as was the case with the Royal Albert Hall.

But this is absolutely not a new idea. It's been done – reasonably successfully – before. To this day, individuals and corporations own seats and boxes in the Royal Albert Hall, and there's a lively secondary market in them. So I do wonder how this patent managed to get granted.

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