Tradition vs. Trend: A Case Study of Team Response to the Secondary Ticket Market

Abstract

The article presents a sports marketing case study on a sports team's response to the secondary market in tickets to its sports events. A National Football League (NFL) team's management of the secondary market is examined. Anonymous team marketing and sales officials describe the team's finances and its ticket pricing policies. The team institutes a relationship with the online ticket sales company Ticketmaster to provide a secondary market for spectators with season tickets to sell tickets to individual games at face value. The officials state that this relationship provided significant indications that the team could increase revenue by instituting variable prices for tickets to individual games based on demand, and by participating in a truly free secondary market. However, the team's owner refused to do so due to the negative associations sports fans have of ticket "scalping."