On the seemingly endless scale of time and space, 10,000 years is "close."
Stadium Discussion
- Thread starter Gene
- Start date
On the seemingly endless scale of time and space, 10,000 years is "close."
Last year at renewal time, a senior ticket executive told me, "If you cancel your tickets now, you're really going to regret it by the end of the calendar year."
I'll add on again that if an announcement was incoming they probably would've delayed renewals. They're not going to let people drop tickets with something so close. It's a lot harder for them to get you back than to keep you.
I wish my ex girlfriend would love me again
Is equal to
NYCFC announce land purchase and stadium construction to be done by 2023...
Some things just dont happen. Especially with love like this.
Is equal to
NYCFC announce land purchase and stadium construction to be done by 2023...
Some things just dont happen. Especially with love like this.
All the nonsense they are pulling with the 2020 renewals has me less optimistic than I've been in a long time. An announcement and timetable solves -- or at least mitigates -- a lot of problems with renewals and downgrades. I don't think they would feel the need to do what they're doing if they knew things would sort themselves out soon.
What is the full list of nonsense? I think the main one is not making pricing comparability transparent, right? Some of the other stuff (e.g., updated terms acknowledgment preceding invoice view) isn’t great but I’m not sure rises to the level of nonsense.
Fwiw, it sounds like they completely restructured the ticket reps just last week, reassigning bunches of accounts and changing around some responsibilities right as they kicked off STH renewals. So I’d bet a significant portion of the lack of transparency/responsiveness comes down less to them jerking us around and more to those guys scrambling with the reorg.
Not to say that makes our experience any better, but I’d hesitate to read this as motivated cynicism by which we can interpret the likelihood of a stadium announcement.
What kind of organization restructures their sales and customer service department right before or at the same time that renewals begin? Brad Sims is an idiot imo and clearly has no idea how to run a soccer club. He should crawl back to the NBA.
Another joke is the lack of pricing map. It's super shady.
Definitely agreed there might have been a better way to do this. I was just trying to differentiate the shady and potentially shady from the ordinary course imperfections.
I think we've seen over the years myriad examples that this team is run extremely poorly in the boardroom. None of this should be a surprise.
It's not a long list, but they strike me as odd and as things you don't do soon before a major announcement solves many problems:
- Secret pricing
- Lowering the price gap between the expensive seats and cheaper seats
I figured out decades ago that when an advertisement says nothing specific about price, and you have to talk to a sales rep to find out basic info, it's too expensive. It means that the good or service being offered is an exclusive, luxury item, for which the ridiculous price is a positive selling point for the intended audience that excludes the riff-raff, and if you have to ask how much it is, then it is not for you. It applies to real estate, clothing, travel, everything. It's a universal truth with very few exceptions. Why the hell is the club signalling this to potential customers when they are desperate to attract new fans? It's still the cheapest major sports offering in the NYC metro area, but they are positioning it like an ad in the NYT Magazine for a new luxury residential tower on the river.
If I were not already a member I'd never fill out that form. On top of the price issue, I hate, hate, hate, having to talk to a sales person just to do basic research, and I'm sick of handing out my contact info to organizations who reciprocate with zero transparency. I don't know of any other sports team that operates like this, and it just seems very unlikely that they would be doing it just before their biggest problem is solved.
Except I also have one counter theory. There have been indications that the club wants to raise prices significantly whenever the stadium does open. They had to use lower prices at YS because it has been, from the beginning, a less than ideal experience, but the time there has gone on longer than anticipated, which has led us consumers to think of these YS prices as the standard NYCFC prices. These prices have become sticky in a way the club never wanted to happen, and it might be the case that they are fogging up the information in order to -- they hope -- make it smoother for them to ramp up prices generally as the new stadium is announced and opened. I honestly have no clue and no strong sense of what they are planning or the timeline. But that's a theory that sort of fits the data.
Agree with all of the first part. Theory only works if Stadium is already announced. You can’t play these pricing games without the lure of a announced stadium.
If a stadium announcement was pending, I’m surprised they wouldn’t delay the renewal to coincide. It’d be the best way to keep retention, which it sounds like is going in the opposite direction.
Also makes me wonder what the tix sales money gets allocated to - been thinking it’s probably FO employee payrolls as a recurring monthly revenue they can mostly count on (minus the midseason tix drop from unhappy holder). If that’s the case, then they need the renewal now with no interruption. This may not be the case, but if they just had a reorg before this dropped, they culled the ranks and probably tightened the belt on the sales group to do more with less.
1) Don’t trust everything you read on the internet
2) If a ticket rep really told a former season ticket holder that, whoa boy. What a slimy thing to do.
2) If a ticket rep really told a former season ticket holder that, whoa boy. What a slimy thing to do.
From what I heard, the reps went from somewhere around 1,000 accounts to something closer to 100. I don’t know what to make of that difference in magnitude, whether it means they hired more people, stopped assigning inactive accounts or distributed rep duties more broadly among people already within the organization, or some combination of all of these, but one way or another I don’t think it’s a matter of belt tightening.
And yet I still can’t get a response.
Not doubting your info, but doing the math, if there are 5000 accounts, that’d be 50 sales people. Seems high from an organizational standpoint since how much interaction does any one account have with the rep during the year, leaving them with a lot of thumb-twirling time - I have had next to no contact outside of a few quick emails or vmail messages spaced out by weeks and months. What else would these sales people be doing to justify their overhead costs (don’t get me started on raising overhead costs when hemorrhaging attendance) - their skillset is not exactly plug/play for other aspects of a sports franchise?
