Cimini on the PSL mailings

I don't want a roof, not for Jet games. The WSS was going to have a retractable one and they had a Super Bowl booked, but I would want the elements for Jet games.

 

If you're on the waiting list and your time comes up to purchase tickets, you will be held to the owner of the PSL's price not the original price. That whole "taxi medallion" ploy from the greedy bastards only works as an investment if you get them first.

 

Totally agree. This is the essence of it. Sad.

 

I'm not so concerned with the roof itself but more of the fact that the stadium costs so much despite not having a roof. A stadium that is this expensive and is going to cost ticket holders as much as it is should have a roof. It makes me wonder what the money is being spent on, lighting????

 

Cup holders. All seats will have cup holders.

 

The cup holders better blow me at halftime. If I'm spending Spitzer-type money for my seats, that is.

 

Here is a copy of how the Bears do their PSL's, and I can only imagine the Jets will follow:
PSL rights do not apply to any other events which may be held at the new stadium, including soccer games, college games, concerts or other programs. Club Seat PSLs, however, do offer a right of first refusal for purchase of tickets to most other events. Other rights exclusive to PSL holders include permanent control of the season tickets and the right to transfer the PSL (each year from February 1 - July 1 - transfers completed through the Bears PSL Marketplace are accepted each year from February 1 - November 1).
You have the right to purchase season tickets every year for each PSL you hold. If you do not purchase season tickets for your PSL seats (which include payment for Club Level seats, if selected) by a specified deadline each year, your PSL for that seat terminates. You also forfeit all monies paid for the PSL and all rights to buy season ticket for those seats for that season and all following seasons.
All Club Seats, which have access to the United Club lounge and other amenities and benefits, are PSL seats. You will be invoiced each year for your Club Level annual fees, which include the costs of Club Level season tickets and all Club Level privileges and amenities, including access into the United Club on gamedays.


GREAAAAAAAAAAT!! So not only are club seats a ridiculous amount of money, but you get invoiced an ADDITIONAL ANNUAL FEE!!

 

I was bitching last year about Direct TV Sunday Package at $250 plus another $100 for HD. They haven't said a word about this year, yet. How much more can they ask for?

 

champ just needs another reason to say "I told you so", really just reaffirming his grasp on the obvious.

 

psl every year

I think that the psl would have to be paid every year. I know that is what they do at College stadiums now. I have season tickets to GT and they make me pay $250 per seat every season in addition to the ticket price now (to offset construction costs from 10 years ago). I know that university of Georgia has donation requirements at and above $2000 per seat in addition to ticket price. I would assume the PSL are basically the same and that charge will be made for each season. Geez and I thought $250 was bad.

 

PSL's are a one time thing. As a matter of fact most teams that have had them have payment plans over 3, 5 or ten years. Jets most likely will also

 

INCCORRECT! PSL`s are a 1 time deal if they call them Permenent Seating Licenses ,If they are called Personnel Seating Licenses (As the JETS are presently calling them ) they can be renewable ,meaning make you pay a huge fee every 5,10,15 years whatever......

 

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June 23, 2008
Woody Johnson’s path to ownership immortality
Jets season ticket holders, and those on the waiting list to get season tickets, spent the weekend mulling – and seething - over the recent PSL survey the Jets sent out. The surveys were received, to understate it a bit, negatively.

Woody Johnson could make it better with a follow-up letter/email such as this:


"Dear Jets season ticket holders,

It is after careful consideration, of both my bank account and yours, that I have decided that this franchise will NOT use PSLs to help finance the new stadium.

I reached this decision not to curry favor with you but simply because there’s always been something kind of untoward about this whole PSL business. It’s time an NFL owner stood up and said, “no.”

I’m sure just about every season ticket holder was concerned recently when we sent out a survey that said, among other things, “The Jets have taken a substantial amount of debt to finance the construction of the new $1.3 billion stadium. Like other teams that have built stadiums in the recent past, the Jets are required to pay back this construction debt quickly. The Jets are surveying different types and terms of Personal Seat Licenses (PSLs) as one of the ways to help achieve this requirement.”

The point has been made elsewhere that this stadium is being funded entirely via private means and the implication of the above passage is because of that, the public should share some of the costs for this private enterprise. If I was a fan and I read that, my response would be this:

So if we as the public have to help subsidize this “private venture,” does this give us even partial equity and therefore the ability to share in some of the profits?

Of course, any owner would have a simple answer to that:

HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

Anyway, in the survey, we describe a PSL as “an asset, like a taxi medallion, that is purchased in addition to the ticket that give the holder ownership of the seat. This holder can then sell the seat license in the future, including for any profit, to someone else if the holder no longer wishes to purchase season tickets.”

That was an affront to your intelligence and an overall clumsy comparison. Did you know that a retiring NYC driver, who had been a cabbie for 25 years, sold his medallion in 2007 for a reported $600,000? According to what I read, the gentleman paid $30,000 for it in 1981. But individuals don’t really buy taxi medallions anymore the way individual fans buy PSLs. The city has just over 13,000 taxi medallions and most of those medallions, because of their high price (we’re talking mid six figures here) and the infrequency in which they hit the open market, are owned by investment companies, THEN leased out to individual drivers.

The medallion analogy fails on so many levels and here’s another: a taxi medallion gives its owner the right to operate a licensed vehicle for continuous profit (basically, the fare charged for driving someone from point A to point B). Where is the continuous profit in a PSL? Sure, you can sell your tickets on a week to week basis but a season ticket holder can do that now, without a PSL.

Most important, let’s be honest about something else here. No fan looks at season tickets as an investment or an asset. Terms like that didn’t enter the sports vernacular when it came to season-ticket discussions until the Carolina Panthers started peddling their PSLs in the mid-90’s and introduced the “investment” concept as a misdirection play to what was really happening: a con and a hustle for an easy influx of cash.

The reality is, those of you who have had season tickets with us since those wind-swept days at Shea or have gotten them since we moved to the wind-swept Meadowlands, you have those tickets because you are rabid fans of your team, some of the most loyal fans in the NFL. Simply put, you love your team, living and discussing it 365, 24/7. The investment you make is emotional with the dividends paid in the form of bonds established between fathers and sons – daughters, too – and/or the friendships forged through the shared experiences of arriving in a parking lot before sunrise and knocking back a few while grilling meat over an open fire.

Believe it or not, sometimes when I watch those scenes on my way into the stadium on Sundays, I’m jealous. Ultimately, pricing those kinds of fans, who repeat that Sunday ritual even in the snow and bone-chilling winds of December, out of seeing their favorite team isn’t the right thing to do.

What was also unfortunate in regard to that survey was its timing. I mean, some of you received it around the same time you read that Anheuser-Busch had joined MetLife as a “cornerstone” sponsor for the new stadium. As we finalize the deal for that money – in the neighborhood of $10 million a year from each cornerstone (and there’s four of them) - you get hit with this prelude to what amounts to a forced panhandle masquerading as a “survey.”

Admittedly, that’s a bit unseemly.

Additionally, and I really should have read this stuff more closely before it went out to you folks, there was this poorly phrased justification:

“PSLs have been sold in virtually every new NFL stadium built in the past 15 years as a way of paying for the construction costs. For example, the Dallas Cowboys have announced a PSL program with prices ranging [from] $2,000 to $12,000 for general admission seats and from $16,000 to $150,000 for club seats.”

But you know what? The “everyone else is doing it so that’s what we’re going to do,” reasoning stinks. It stinks because that’s not how my family built the company it founded in the late 19th century into one of the world’s great corporate juggernauts. And it’s not how I became one of the nation’s sharpest businessmen. I became who I am by knowing that it’s possible to go against the grain, to take calculated risks and still succeed. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is not a path and leave a trail.’

Just one small example: Over 30 years ago when I was starting off in Florida, I invested in this new fad known as “cable” television. This, when banks wouldn’t touch the stuff. Sold it off, too, at a tidy profit when I was ready to tackle other interests. The unconventional aspect of who I am extends into my personal life as I’m one of the few of the super-wealthy who, when lobbying Congress, has done so for philanthropic purposes. That’s how six years ago I secured a guaranteed $750 million in funds for diabetes research.

‘go instead where there is not a path and leave a trail…’

So that’s what we, the New York Jets, will do, regardless of the Giants’ plans, which though not yet announced, are to sock their fans with PSLs at to-be-determined prices. I will let the Giants turn themselves into all sorts of verbal pretzels in attempting to dress the PSL porker up into something aesthetically pleasing, tossing around words like “asset” and “investment,” to make it sound like a benefit to fans when it only benefits ownership.

I can tell you parking and concessions will still be high, and there will be gradual ticket increases, but those things have been going on for years in professional sports and, I think, most of you grudgingly accept that as the price of doing business. It’s the concept of paying a user’s fee for the right to THEN pay those outrageous prices that disgusts you, and understandably so. Seriously, do I have to pay a PSL on my owner’s suite? That’s ridiculous and I’m not going to ask you to do something I myself wouldn’t do and certainly wouldn’t want to do.

In short, the debt issues are real but guess what? A lot of my success in life can be credited to this adage: there’s always more than one way. And I intend to find it.

Go Jets!

Sincerely,
Robert Wood Johnson IV






Posted by Erik Boland on June 23, 2008 1:18 PM | Permalink | Comments

 

Why anyone wants to attend a professional football game anymore is beyond me. You pay a fortune for what? The right to have some drunken idiot sit behind you screaming their head off the entire game as happened the last time I attended a football game. Some of the folks here got it right. The only way to watch a football game these days is Direct TV, etc. Football games now take at least three hours. Do you know how much action you actually see in those three hours? Approximately 16 minutes! That's right, you sit there for over three hours having some idiot spill bear all over you and your kids for 16 minutes of action. Is that really worth the drive to the park, the cost of everything, deadling with the environment? Me thinks not. If you ever get a chance watch the Jets Super Bowl III victory, see how long the game actually takes. See how the game flows. Then compare it to all the absurd timeouts they have these days because they need money to pay all the ridiculous player salaries. So me, who cares about PSLs. I'm sitting in the comfort of my home where I can actually do something productive during the 2 hours 44 minutes on non-action. :beer:

 

i thought you had a good time sitting in front of me.... geez some people just dont know how to have fun anymore

 

I totally agree. I've got game tapes from the 80s and the games flow far more smoothly and develop a rhythm. There is no rhythm in modern football, except for the regular appearance of those long ad breaks, that is.

I forget how long ago it was, but the NFL became concerned about how long games were running (I think this was in the 90s). They looked at ways of reducing the running time and they actually came up with the solution of reducing the number of plays in each game. They actually reduced the amount of football by having the clock continue to run on running and passing plays that ended up out of bounds, plays that used to stop the clock.

I'd love to have the time to look into how many fewer plays this created, but it only worked for a while because as more and more ad breaks were squeezed in the games went up over three hours again.

I'm not generally a doom-and-gloom person, but I can see a scenario where they actually kill this game. It's already a recipe for attention-deficit disorder, now fans are being priced out of attending the games and the atmosphere at stadiums could take a big hit.

 

Haha.

I like to go out there and make a day out of it, cook out and stuff. Sometimes I look forward to the road games and the DirecTV package, if I get priced out that will be what I do. I have a grill at home, too, and will just pick up tickets to a few games here and there.