Pity Poor John Mara; He Has to Charge Giants Fans $750 Million for Seat Licenses

Peter King, America's most successful NFL reporter, wrote something ridiculous -- but not surprising -- about Giants owner John Mara in this week's Monday Morning Quarterback column on SI.com.

King noted that Mara is planning to force Giants season ticket holders to pay thousands of dollars for personal seat licenses if they want to keep their season tickets when the Giants move into a new stadium in two years. And in the process he made Mara sound like a martyr.

King wrote, "I feel for one owner here -- John Mara of the Giants." And he then proceeded to describe how he knows that Mara "is sick about what he knows he's going to have to do": Charge what King estimates will be an average of $25,000 per fan to at least 30,000 fans to buy personal seat licenses at the Giants' new stadium.
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That's right. King feels for Mara because Mara "is sick about" collecting $750 million (using King's estimate) from the fans. King then continues that Mara will feel so badly that "this is something that will keep him up nights."

Here's a radical idea, if Mara doesn't want to charge season-ticket holders for personal-seat licenses: Don't. Simply don't do it. Continue operating the same way you've been operating, using the $100 million a year or so you get from your share of the NFL's TV contracts, plus all the other cash you bring in from the gate and merchandise and so on, and run your business without charging the fans for personal-seat licenses.

Did you feel sorry for Mara when he was making his millions without personal seat licenses? I suspect, if you're a typical fan, you didn't. But one of the differences between the typical fan and the reporters who cover sports is that reporters display an overly reverential attitude toward team owners, ascribing to them all sorts of qualities like generosity and great business acumen, even though many of them do everything they can to squeeze every last nickel out of the fans, and even though many of them (including Mara) own their teams not because of great business acumen but because their fathers and grandfathers were owners.

King doesn't think it's possible that Mara would charge the fans for seat licenses as anything other than a last resort. He writes, "in this climate, with the economy being what it is, the Giants and Jets will both have to." But that really isn't true. The economy itself is in a slowdown, but NFL revenues are continuing to grow. And the Yankees and the Mets are both building new stadiums in New York and doing so without selling personal seat licenses.

Obviously, Mara isn't charging the fans for personal seat licenses because he has to, he's doing it because he's a businessman, in business to make money, and he knows perfectly well that the majority of Giants season-ticket holders will pay whatever he charges in order to keep their season tickets.

Similarly, the Yankees and Mets aren't declining to sell personal seat licenses out of some sense of moral rectitude, they're doing it because, the Mets' executive vice president of business operations told Bloomberg News, market research indicated that "it would not be well received by our fan base."

Personal seat licenses have been around since the Carolina Panthers sold them before they entered the NFL as an expansion team in 1995. They're neither good nor bad; they're simply another way that NFL owners get rich from the football-loving American public. But please, spare us the sob stories about how bad those team owners feel as they get rich off us.

Anyway, the issue here is less about personal seat licenses than it is about the way the sports media give owners more credit than they deserve. It's strange the way team owners are praised for philanthropy when they donate a relative pittance to charity, or for wisdom when they do nothing more than inherit a profitable business and keep it profitable. Owners are almost always described in more favorable terms than athletes, even though athletes had to prove themselves on the field of play to get where they are, while many owners are utterly untested.

Sports fans would get much more insightful coverage if the sports media took a more skeptical view of team owners. As far as owners are concerned, their teams are businesses, and they're in the business of making money. Why is it so hard for so many members of the sports media to understand that?

Maybe we need more sports reporters whose background is in business journalism. I'm sure oil company executives would claim they feel the same way about high gas prices that King thinks Mara feels about personal seat licenses: Of course, those oil executives would say, they feel terrible about making record profits while gas prices reach record highs. The difference is that no business reporter would ever be naive enough to believe them.