SBJ: What are the biggest areas of opportunity right now in live sports ticketing?
Brian Norman, Harris Blitzer Sports & Entertainment: Ten years ago, we’d spend a lot of time [asking], “How are we getting more data on the fans coming into our buildings?” In 2025, it’s about taking that data, and [asking]: “How are we speaking to our fans and our audiences in a more creative, personalized and tailored way?”
It’s a lot different from what we were doing even three, four or five years ago, pre-pandemic. At this point, we’re really looking at how we personalize that experience, and also then figuring out the right product fit. With the quantity of products and the vast amount of experiences we can provide, leveraging the data profiles we’ve built over the years with our friends at KAGR into a more modern outreach perspective, based on AI and automation, is something we’re spending a lot of time on.
Jonathan Tillman, NBA: The live-game sports product has never been better. It’s fed this insatiable demand for sports. The big question for all of us is: How do we sustain and keep this momentum going? Especially as we look at the changes we have in our consumer base, and the diversity of fans that require all these unique touch points.
Patrick Ryan, Eventellect: What we’re very focused on is helping teams understand channels and aligning what seats they want to sell via what channel. [An opportunity is] helping teams evaluate the right product for the right customer and making sure that they all have their own space to breathe.
SBJ: How about at the platform level?
Russ D’Souza, SeatGeek: We did some analysis that said [teams and venues] are putting $15 billion worth of physical investments in these stadiums. Whenever teams do this, the single thing they focus on is adding more premium areas. And then when you look at the shopping experience where those tickets are merchandised, it’s actually quite poor a lot of the time. It doesn’t sell that experience at all.
It’s usually dots on a map, and maybe some text about you get “X, Y and Z included.” That’s not the experience if you’re actually there. So how can we, as platforms, really bring that to life?
In our case, we’re working with our clients [to develop features such as] seat perks, where you can filter search results based upon like, “I want F&B access and a private bathroom.” So, two clicks, and you see just that inventory. Or you can use really immersive photography and videos — maybe even user-generated content — to highlight what it’s like to sit in this location as the event is happening.
Brad Sims, NYCFC: If there’s an environment like that, I want to know that data from a club standpoint, and we want to have full control ideally over the fan experience and the journey online. [Now] if you come to the New York City FC app, you’re looking around, as soon as I click “buy ticket,” boom, I’m no longer in my environment anymore — I’m in the Ticketmaster environment. I don’t know what’s happening with them from there on out. With our new stadium project and everything that we’re doing, that’s something we’re really looking at: How do we own that entire fan journey and have them, in an ideal world, never leave our environment? That doesn’t mean that we can’t work closely with the partner on that.
Paul Kavanaugh, BSE Global: It’s really interesting how these conversations merge so well. There’s so much investment in all these new spaces at venues, which creates this variety of products. To be able to sell such a vast variety of products, you need all these different tools, so your sales team is better equipped.
We are one of those venues that have invested in diversifying our product offerings, really focused on premium — top-end premium to low-end premium. And we’re very much focused right now on AI to try to enable our sales staff, acknowledging that it’s just really difficult to tell the story in the open marketplace of the benefits of new spaces or what you’re trying to achieve. That’s been a huge difficulty for us.
Todd Glickman, Comcast Spectacor: From a ticketing perspective, I try to be very focused on the sales executives that are selling this product and how we are training them. You can have the data, but at the end of the day, you still need that young Brad Sims there — and I need a bunch of them — that are going to go out and be trained properly. I will walk those floors and bluntly, sometimes, you can be a little taken aback, because there’s no AI and there’s no technology or data mapping that’s going to fix if you have blown that phone call right there. And so that’s a big, big focus for us.
Jessica Gelman, KAGR: The biggest asset outside of real estate that teams are going to be able to monetize, increasingly on an international basis, is their customer base. It’s incumbent upon all of us to capture as much data as we possibly can on that customer and own it. I’m talking about the “war” for data, and who owns it, and what is the right way to share it.
Once they convert to us, how do you personalize it? The biggest evolution on ticketing is this movement away from a demographic-based approach to who the fan is. The sports industry is so far behind in how we’re selling and engaging; we have to be evolving to the stage of life that those people are in.
Jake Bye, N.Y. Mets: Where we’ve seen huge growth is online, big-ticket purchases. I bought my house in Connecticut on FaceTime, literally; that was unheard of 10 years ago. You buy cars online, you buy houses, so let’s sell our premium products.
We hired [virtual real estate software] Matterport just like you would at a house. You can walk through your space, and make it as immersive as you want, but I think the pendulum can swing too far away from people-based. One area we’ve really leaned into is training — even our entry-level rep — not just how to sell, not just a telephone narrative, but understanding our business, so they’re intelligent about what is happening in partnerships. It’s great for staying power, because they feel invested; they’re product matter experts.
A tech thing we just started: We have this transcription AI tool, so every phone call is recorded. The reps know it. We can go in and listen to anything. And it is so useful. On sentiment, it’ll record the percentage of the calls that are positive or negative, based on key words. We can go to a rep and say, “All right, you’re indexing high on negative calls, let’s drill down and figure out why.”
Ryan: [A big area of opportunity is] marketing to the customer while they’re in your building. I’ve been to almost every professional sports venue. I always buy high-end seats. It shocks me that I’ll buy a $1,000 club seat, and my next correspondence from the team is a Weedeater ad from Scott’s because I just go into their generic marketing funnel. But when they’re in your building, they’re so captive. You can wine and dine them, surprise and delight them. Then you say, “Hey, this product is available as a mini plan.”
Bye: We’ve started looking at ticket transfers for suites. We can run tools to figure out if they have C-level executives as guests in suites. Selling premium online, you see the average ticket price on SeatGeek for premium space is ridiculous. People are voluntarily raising their hand and saying, “I like nice things.” We score that lead, and then it goes into one of eight sales journeys based on the information you procure from that. But without that transaction being available, it may never happen.
In baseball, it used to be that single-game buyers were your best lead set for season tickets. So, you bang your head against the wall and make a thousand phone calls to a guy who the data says they come 1.2 times a year. Just treat them as a single-game buyer. That’s OK. Monetize them in other ways and go source leads where you’re not going to leave a voicemail that goes ignored.
Gelman: With our clients, a huge portion — like somewhere between 50% to 70% of monetized customers, engaged customers — are coming from the transfers.
Glickman: It’s interesting about singles. On the single-event buyer for suites, there was a mind-numbing amount [of sales contacts] from our premium group, like taking that single-event suite buyer, and saying, “Hey, that can be converted into a package.” The data says differently. These people are not buying suites. They’re just not. It’s really a group sale. It’s a different form of group sale, a loaded ticket in a smaller area — in suite, in essence. But I don’t think at this point they’re really real leads for us.
Adam Budelli, StubHub: This is why we believe in open distribution. We’re sitting on a plethora of data. From our point of view, we’re looking for rights holders that just are willing to engage. The more information we have to help merchandise their tickets, the better for us. The more data we can pass back, the better for you. A lot of the issue we see on our side is just restriction, and inability just to actually engage. There’s a lot of marketplaces like ours that are just trying to be good stewards and sell a lot of tickets and can really help create that unified approach that you guys need to take your business to the next level.
Ryan: We did a study for a team where $60 million of their season-ticket spend, $10 million was brokers that they did not have flagged as brokers. Half of those had never transferred a ticket. These brokers are using Apple Wallet and Android Wallet to skirt past the transfers. That’s a huge issue.
We’ve had to add a whole division that does ticket utilization studies. What it uncovers is wild. If you look at your fan and they’re coming into four different gates? That’s a reseller. Your season-ticket holder comes in the same gate at the same time. All these costs get absorbed to sell to people who aren’t really your consumer. That’s brass tacks: Who’s actually coming in? What can we do to lock down these wallets? How can we partner with the marketplace to make sure that the teams are getting all the data they should be getting?
Budelli: The teams that tend, in our opinion, to say they’re fully consolidated, are the ones whose data are going to show it’s completely opposite because they’re just not going to list theirs. By opening up and creating these opportunities, it’s going to naturally clean up the market, and help you understand where your tickets are actually going. A lot of times, I’ll say that 99.9% of tickets bought on StubHub are end users, whereas some of the primary data that you have, a lot of them are just buying to flip on other sites like StubHub.
Bye: We can’t restrict [resale] in New York, but we can reward fans for not reselling. We compensate our reps if their book of business attends over what we expected them to attend any given month. They’re constantly giving them reasons to forward, reasons to donate, not just go flip them. But the other side of that too is the value. If you clean out the secondary market and you head it off at the pass, the value of resale for a member goes through the roof because they actually have a healthy pricing environment.
Budelli: From a technology standpoint, that’s a big focus area for us. Why is your most premium fan, the season-ticket holder, having the worst experience and the least amount of technology in the entire market to just resell their ticket? If they can actually get the value of the ticket, they’re going to renew year after year after year. So why do they have the worst ability to do so? By cleaning it up, also, you’re not getting that garage broker that’s selling $2 tickets on a Tuesday night and devaluing your reps on the phone on Wednesday morning.
Norman: Within our NHL business, we offer a buy-back program up to a certain number of games. We budget for it every year. We have 56 KPIs that we look at from a retention modeling perspective every year in our NHL business, and by far No. 1 is buy-back utilization. Obviously, you’re giving yourself a head start in the following year, so you need to budget accordingly.
However, for us it also becomes part of our strategy. If we have an at-risk account who’s lower attendance or who’s late on payments or whatever it might be in certain areas, that’s the account that we’re actually proactively going out to, saying, “I know you’ve missed the last three games. Before you miss the fourth, let’s utilize the buy-back program here.”
Sims: What are you giving them? What percentage and how far?
Norman: We give them the full variable price, but they have to give them back to us 72 hours in advance at least. So we have the opportunity to flip them and turn them at a higher yield product.
Glickman: How many times a year can they do that?
Norman: In our NHL business, they can do it up to five times throughout the year. And then we also offer a swap program as well on both businesses, where we give people the opportunity to swap within price tiers, within game tiers, within their membership.
SBJ: As demand for traditional full-season plans slows, do we think there is a floor, or will it continue to decline?
Norman: The statement of the season ticket is dead, or the traditional executive suite is dead, that’s overblown. What we’ve seen in working with KAGR and with our partners over the years is that the makeup and the quantity of account shareholders is increasing. You still have that point person who’s had season tickets with you for 10 or 15 years, but maybe instead of going to a lot of games with their kids, or with their neighbors, they’re splitting it with a colleague, or they’re transferring tickets. There’s an ecosystem of new tech that specializes in that.
But we want to lean into the benefits packaging of that experience, so there is still value in being a season-ticket member — still value in getting playoff access, still value in having that tenure, but you may not be coming to 41 games yourself; you might be coming to 25 or 30, or 15.
Bye: Our data tells us our members’ most important thing is their seat location, so if you throw that out the window, you create a host of other problems. There is an optimal revenue mix in the ballpark, which admittedly we don’t have enough data on yet as we’re trying to figure it out for the Mets.
Tillman: Sometimes we transfer this [fan] relationship to that owner of the ticket, who now owns the relationship with their share partners, and we’re not involved in some way — we’re seeing a lot of teams making that push to say, “We want to actually have more of that data ourselves.” And they want to sell more right-sized packets for the fans and now own that relationship with all their share partners. In our league, there’s just more and more teams that are diving into this particular strategy.
Norman: A lot of these teams that are starting to move away from the full season and make it more of a half-season mix or quarter-season mix, they’re actually recognizing the higher yield in those tickets. There’s a significant financial benefit to the teams that are able to do it directly.
Tillman: There are certainly opportunities in pricing here. One of the things that we all wrestle with is that balance of affordability for the fan. I have to make sure we keep the doors open for everyone. But one of the encouraging things that we’re seeing across our league, especially as teams diversify their product mix, we’re seeing higher show-rates, younger consumers, more women and diversity across the board coming in to do smaller packages, as opposed to what we see in traditional full-season business.
D’Souza: It’s so important to think about how to make that self-serve. That modern consumer wants to be able to buy four tickets in a bespoke package on their phone with four clicks. If you just look at the economics of ticketing and how deals are structured, there’s not very much credit given to building technology that helps season-ticket holders. Where do ticketing companies make their money? Primarily fees on single-game tickets, third-party events and resale. What is the incentive structure to create a great value proposition for the fan base that you guys care about the most, which is your season-ticket holders?
SBJ: What are some of the products that have helped get to the season-ticket equivalent, even if you’re not selling a full season?
Gelman: I have season tickets to Harvard women’s basketball. I go to a lot of games, but I give away tickets. One of the best parts we’re not accounting for is the way those people get to feel a little special, too. If we could bring all of that to season tickets — if someone you transfer a ticket, it’s awesome for someone from the team to greet them, too, and say, “Hey, great to see you.” Because feeling special, and then giving your tickets to someone else and they get to feel special, too? That’s what’s going to keep that season-ticket member strong, among other things.
Tillman: Many season-ticket holders say their most important relationship is with their season-ticket rep, the usher in their section. There is technology that can help enrich those engagements, make them much better.
Ryan: The Dodgers say that the No. 1 benefit noted for the Dodgers Club, the most premium real estate in their stadium, is when the person putting on the wristband knows their name. Not the free food, not seeing Orel Hershiser down there. Simple stuff.
D’Souza: We ask organizations, who does it well outside of sports? Often, the airlines come up. I have an affinity towards Delta. It’s the knowledge that there’s some algorithm working in the background that says I might upgrade my ticket based upon something they see as valuable for our business. That’s meaningful to me. I will book on Delta because I’m likely to have higher priority, and good things will happen.
I think upgrades in general, and “surprise and delight” is a very underutilized thing because it’s all so clunky, the way that a lot of systems are built. What we’ve done is allow that to be one tap away — you can upgrade, and now you can spend more money for that upgrade.
But there should be a smart team using that data, to determine: If I upgrade this suite based upon their behavior, this leads to an X percent likelihood that they will renew their season tickets, or move up into the new section they were upgraded into, that’s all technology.
Sims: Having an email to opt in and say, “I would be interested in an upgrade if one became available.” Then you’re going to have that data too, and then you’re going to feel able to visit them. Having that automated, I think, is a big opportunity that I haven’t seen from a club.
SBJ: Overall, what are we seeing in ticket pricing?
Ryan: The big picture pricing-wise that we’ve been seeing since COVID is the high-demand events and the best seats are hotter — look at the Knicks; the [Knicks-Celtics conference semifinal Game 3] looks like a Finals game on Saturday. Don’t tell me there’s a demand issue. People are spending $7,000 to sit third row; wasn’t that long ago that was the price of a courtside Finals ticket. Those types of events, there is no elasticity, people will spend whatever. But then we’re looking at the lower-demand events, and we are seeing some real headwinds.
Gelman: The advancement of analytics and open distribution, it’s provided a lot of perspective and insights to teams, and the leagues are playing a huge role in this, too, about what the actual market is.
Previously teams were operating from a perspective of: “Our owners want us to make more money every year, so we’re going to increase, and we think the fan is going to be willing to bear a 2% increase across board, whatever the number is.” There’s information now that is more readily available, thanks to some new people coming into the industry who are sharing information, and the teams now have a better understanding of what fans are willing to spend. So, the teams are basically charging more.
For pricing, the question I think is: Are we at a point where the 10%, 15% price increases that we’ve been able to adjust, is that coming to an end? Because from a fan perspective, now there’s more readily available AI to do the research and searching for you. You’re able to ask: Give me all the benefits that I would get if I was a season-ticket member versus if I bought here. That’s coming from a fan power perspective, and it’s incumbent upon the industry to evolve and change.
SBJ: Do you think you need to adjust expectations for fans, to educate them about the actual value of a ticket?
Glickman: We hadn’t done a ticket increase in seven years. I had big meetings about the ticket increase: decks, presentations, preparation. [It was as if we thought] the world was going to fall. And when we put it out, crickets. I got zero complaint calls, and we were armed for bear. I do think the fan understands it.
Bye: We don’t make it a newsworthy event, announcing how we’re going to price our season tickets for the 10,000-11,000 people who own them in the market of 9 million. I think usually the blowback comes organically through survey results, feedback, sales reps, all of that. But it usually isn’t a driver of the actual business results, because often what people do doesn’t align with what they say in a moment of, “I can’t believe you raised my price.” There’s a bond [with teams] that really transcends 3%, 5%. You do the work and you let it happen. I do think people understand.
Budelli: It’s almost a softball for the media. We see it a lot. A lot of the interviews that I do for StubHub start with: “We see a ticket for $5,000.” I have to say, “Well, the average ticket price sold is $44. So, let’s actually tell the right narrative.”
Kavanaugh: We’ve found generally on the season-ticket side that the customer is educated. The question is: What value do you place on loyalty? And that becomes a one-to-one conversation. A fan might say, “I have been with this organization for X amount of years; what is that value that provides me?”
To use the WNBA growth as an example here, on the Liberty side, we had to be very deliberate in how we look at those consumers who were with us prior to that growth, and calculating perfectly the value of that loyalty is a challenge.
Gelman: You grandfathered some of the more loyal fans?
Kavanaugh: We did.
Ryan: The core tenet for us is making sure the teams have flexibility. Some NBA teams with 10-game plans, the Lakers are not included in any of the plans. That gives the teams a lot of leverage, and a lot of flexibility. Not having season tickets in the back three rows of a section gives the team a lot of flexibility. Having the right structure gives you flexibility. Or as the renewals come in and people are opting out, and then you go on a run, maybe you don’t have to resell these as seasons. You mentioned [Manchester] City; they haven’t sold a new season ticket in six years. Because when people cancel, they just convert it to a hospitality ticket where there’s so much more yield.
Sims: Or they know that you can sell the five biggest games on the schedule, you get more yield out of the entire season than as a 19-game season. So, if people don’t renew, it’s not the end of the world.
