Charlotte’s new Major League Soccer team last month unveiled ticket prices and disclosed that one-time seat licenses would be required for all but a handful of tickets. Since then, the most ardent fans and supporters’ groups have lashed out at owner David Tepper and the team for opting to enter the league with some of the highest prices while bringing seat licenses to MLS for the first time.
Tepper agreed to pay an MLS-record $325 million expansion fee in December 2019 to land the Charlotte team. He also owns the NFL Carolina Panthers and Bank of America Stadium, which the Panthers will share with the soccer team — Charlotte FC — beginning next year.
Tepper Sports and Entertainment, the parent company of the Panthers and Charlotte FC, declined to make an executive available to discuss ticket pricing and strategy. A spokesman told CBJ that Charlotte FC is “encouraged” by initial sales and response to the pricing introduced last month.
Currently, season tickets are on sale for the 11,000-seat premium club level and the supporters’ section. The latter section is reserved for supporters’ groups and requires no seat license; tickets are $27 per match and $486 for the season. Charlotte FC will have one of the larger MLS supporters’ sections at 4,000 capacity.
On March 15, the remaining seats, priced at $35 to $110 per game and requiring one-time seat license fees of $350 to $900, go on sale. Seat license fees are $550 for the club level tickets already on sale with per-match prices of $90 to $125. Season tickets cost between $630 and $2,250 for club seat and general seating sections.
According to trade publication Team Marketing Report, the average MLS ticket price in 2019 for general seats was $34.10 and $131.12 for premium areas. Charlotte FC ranks third in the league for pricing when expansion teams are included, according to The Charlotte Observer.
BofA Stadium has capacity of 75,000 but will use only the lower level — and sell about 32,000 seats plus suites — for MLS matches. Those figures include 151 suites; team executives have said they hope to lease 135 of the luxury boxes. In 2019, as Tepper continued to lobby for a Charlotte expansion team, Tepper Sports secured commitments for 60 MLS suite leases for $100,000 each.
Charlotte FC also plans to offer several thousand seats per match for single-match and group sales.
Seat licenses have been used by numerous NFL teams and in other sports, often to help pay for new stadiums or large-scale renovations.
Tepper has no plans to build a standalone home for Charlotte FC. This month, Tepper Sports started work on $50 million worth of renovations at BofA Stadium to add soccer locker rooms, improve concourses and make other MLS-specific upgrades. City government and Charlotte FC will each contribute $25 million.
“In football, PSLs are a tried-and-true method of raising funds” for stadiums, sports business consultant Marc Ganis told CBJ. “For soccer, this is not a common usage. This may be the first, but it’s also the highest expansion fee ever paid to MLS and the stadium is undergoing renovations with a meaningful amount of private funds. There are reasons why this would be appropriate for this to be the first.”
A number of local fans disagree, pointing to other MLS expansion teams, including St. Louis and Austin, that are not requiring seat licenses but that will play in new stadiums.
“Like politics, all pricing is local," said Whitney Wagoner, director of the Warsaw Sports Marketing Center at the University of Oregon. We collectively always jump to comparing across the league. But that really should not matter — to the club or to the fans. What does this market bear? What are the economic forces? It really should not matter how that compares to Columbus or Portland.”
Ganis, Wagoner and other experts and consultants said Tepper Sports should know the Charlotte market as well as anyone and be able to set prices accordingly.
The team website notes the seat licenses are one-time fees that can be paid for over a 12-month period interest-free. And the team has emphasized the benefits of PSLs for everyone attending games. “In addition,” a statement on the Charlotte FC website notes, “your seat license purchase will help contribute to creating a top-level match day experience through a number of soccer-specific changes to the stadium and fan enhancements.”
Southbound & Crown, a newer supporters’ group, cited the prices as a “barrier to entry for many supporters” and said the high cost of admission runs counter to MLS’ “reputation for affordability.” The group’s statement also asks why Charlotte has some of the most expensive tickets in the league before having played a single match.
Mint City Collective, perhaps the most established local supporters’ group, offered a mixed response. The group said it lacked consensus on the prices and, because of that, opted against a public stance. On seat licenses, Mint City is opposed.
On Feb. 24, Mint City posted a message on social media that stated the following: “We certainly understand the frustration with PSLs & ticket pricing. We were against PSLs, voiced our dissatisfaction to the team directly, and we also put out a statement before pricing was officially released.”
Another group, The Queen’s Firm, pointed to the use of seat license fees as “a barrier” to the promise of having a soccer team help unite neighborhoods and communities in Charlotte.
Victor Matheson, a sports economist at College of the Holy Cross, attributed the high prices and inclusion of seat licenses to the record $325 million fee Tepper paid for the team.
“You have a franchise owner who really, really wanted to get in,” Matheson said.
Personal seat licenses make sense in the NFL, especially when a new stadium is being built but also because a significant chunk of ticket revenue in pro football is divided among all the teams. Seat license revenue is not shared in football, making it all the more desirable for owners.
Looking at Charlotte FC’s circumstances, “Here you’ve got a case where neither applies,” Matheson said.
Fans and fan sites in other parts of the country also took notice, comparing the high-end season prices unfavorably with clubs in the Premier League, the world’s highest level of soccer competition.
MLS and soccer, to a greater degree than more established U.S. spectator sports leagues such as the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball, depend on organized fan groups and the match-day environment created by their most loyal fans to sustain support.
John Guppy, founder of Gilt Edge Soccer Marketing and a former executive with the MLS Chicago Fire FC, mentioned Tepper Sports President Tom Glick’s past experience as an executive in the Premier League as evidence that Charlotte FC understands the nuances between soccer and other sports and will recognize those differences in marketing and running the team.
“I certainly don’t understand their audience to the level that I would assume that they do, given who they are and their ownership,” Guppy said. “My assumption is that know their market and believe there is demand there. … Charlotte is not a market that’s adverse to PSLs, given the history of that product.”
He added: “Any time you introduce pricing that is relatively high in the scheme of the soccer world and PSLs, which is not something we’ve seen in MLS, I think it’s inevitable you’re going to get some negative feedback from your fan base.”
Guppy said Charlotte FC should be able to overcome initial resistance, in part, because the supporters’ area does not require a seat license. The team will begin its debut season a year from now after delaying a previous start date of 2021 due to the pandemic.