I’ve been considering (Razorback) season tickets, but from what I can tell all it gets you is a price hike, “donation” requirements, parking access, and the seats that don’t move.
To be clear, their website advertises season tickets are about $250 per game for upper level and $450 for lower level. But lower level, 50 yard-line tickets are $250 for the best games and under $100 for the cheap games. And that’s not even taking into consideration the donation requirements. Am I missing something?
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$250 per game, not including the donation, cannot be the right number. That is outrageous.
My tickets are $395 each for the whole season and my Gamecock Club donation was $760, but I could have gotten away with a donation of $175 if I only wanted 2 seats.
$395 x 6 seats + $760 donation = $3,130
$3,130 / (6 seats x 7 games) = $74.52 per ticket per game.
The Gamecock Club donation also covers the 2 basketball season tickets I have, so technically the cost of donation could be spread across those as well
Wow, okay. I was thinking about this all wrong. When they said “each” I thought it meant per game. It really is for the season. You add in the donation cost (which you are kind of locked into forever), which adds to the price. But that cost is also spread out across however many season tickets you’re buying.
The biggest problem is that if you ever drop the season tickets, you have to keep paying membership fees if you ever want season tickets again. (From my understanding.)
Edit: Actually I’ve been looking into the last part. I think the required membership fees are only $50 yearly. There’s a stipulation for maintaining the same donation amount, but that’s only for keeping your seats in the same spot.
It varies by team, venue, tailgate locations, nearby restaurants/bars, etc. I’ve found in recent years that it isn’t worth it due to the donation requirements except for the intangible value of supporting the team.
Prior to 2018, the “donation” was 80% tax-deductible, but since the tax code got revised there’s not much financial incentive.
If your school regularly plays huge non-con opponents, you could re-sell those single game tickets to recoup most or all of your investment, and then enjoy the rest of the season at a huge discout. For Texas, I think 2019 LSU and 2022 Alabama tickets were going for about $400 per seat at the cheapest and for most of the stadium much more. But that only works every other year at most (2018 USC tickets were vastly cheaper, for example). And I think that’s kind of a shitty thing to do if you really are a fan of your school. I was at the 2019 LSU game to cheer us on against the fighting Joe Burrows and that was an amazing experience even though we lost.
Personally, I wouldn’t do it. Texas offers young alumni season tickets at a discount and I still didn’t bite on those when I was living in Austin after graduating. I prefer decent seats for one game a year than tickets to all games in the nosebleeds on the visitor side.
Wow, so the “donations” part was really just a tax loophole to get a tax break from part of your ticket price. That makes A LOT of sense, especially with some of the higher donation requirements being 10k-20k. For the rich who could use a 20k tax break, that means almost nothing.
- Back in the day, it used to be cheaper to buy season tickets than to buy tickets for every individual game. So a whole lot of if it inertia from being the standard way to go to all/most home games.
- Knowing you have the same seats in the same location near (mostly) the same people for every game it pretty nice.
- You can just relax with the comfort of having tickets in hand before a game instead of regularly having to go through the hassle of finding decently priced tickets before any game you want to attend.
But yeah, the administrative need to maximize revenue in the next quarter and the enshittification of everything means these benefits are hardly worth the cost any more. Which is why we’ve seen lots of articles the past few years about decreasing attendance in stadiums nationwide. Surely it must be because the fans aren’t supporting the teams hard enough any more!
