The Stadium Squeeze | The Avid Ep. 6

$1,777. That's what it costs a family of four to attend ONE Detroit Lions game in 2025. Up 201% in a decade. And here's the punchline — the stadium technology industry, in their own publications, openly admits that "stadiums can't compete on picture quality or convenience" with watching at home. They KNOW the couch is better. They're charging you $1,777 anyway. This week on The Avid: the Stadium Squeeze. Raw. Unfiltered. 10 minutes.

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Transcript

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What's going on, Avid fam? How you guys all doing today? We're trying different things up in here, trying to give you guys different flavors. So if you like something, the music, the intros, let us know. We'd love to hear from you. My name is Arik, and we're avid fans here, and we talk about the game that we love. We're raw and unfiltered, and we try to hit the truth every time. Sports media might not say everything, we try to say all of it, and that's why we're here to it. Talking about the stadium experience. Man, this is like the stadium squeeze more than an experience, if you ask me. So when I look at the numbers, I see $1,777. Now people might say, hey, that's a little bit out there, but let's just talk about it. That's what I've seen cost, okay? A family of four to attend Detroit Lions game in 2025. That was one game for people. Now, that wasn't season tickets, that wasn't luxury suite, that wasn't the playoffs, that was four cheapest available seats, parking, four hot dogs, two beers, a couple of sodas, but one regular season here. Alright, that's all we had. The Lions now are the worst offender. They're not alone, but they're the worst offender. The Eagles charge a family for about $1,400. Raiders, Packers, Bears, they clear about $1,200, and the league average is actually $777.89 per family per game. In case you think that's normal, those numbers are up 201% since 2014 for Lions fans. Now, specifically, the Lions are a little bit of an anomaly here, but it's important to talk about them because that's 201% in a decade. And meanwhile, like this is the part that kind of broke my brain a little bit when I found this, but the stadium technology industry, in their own trade publications, openly admitted, and I quote, stadiums can't compete on picture quality or convenience with watching at home. That's not me saying it. That's the people selling stadium tech saying it. They know. They know going to the game has become a worse product than the alternative. They're still charging $1,700 for it. So this week we're going to go through it. The cost, the hassle, the lie they keep selling about the live experience, which I love, don't get me wrong, we're going to get into that too. And the math that makes going to the game in 2026 might be maybe like the dumbest entertainment purchase when you're looking at about cost-effective purchases in the US right now. So let's start with the comparison that should really just end this conversation almost off the bat. But going to the game versus watching it at home, right? Okay, let's do the math real quick live. So when you go to a game, let's say four tickets, upper deck, $400 to $1,800, depending on the team. You got parking, $40 to $80. You got beer that costs around $14 each. To hot dogs, around $7 to $12 again, depending all on the team, but that's a range we're looking at. Concession stand water, $6. My bathroom line, how long is that? 20 minutes minimum. My cell signal kind of sucks. I always have zero bars about 60% of these stadiums. Traffic gets in and now within another 90 minutes. And now I got my total time invested. Well, I'm looking at seven to eight hours. So let's just say total cost, family of four. 777 jackpot, right? And 1700 in Detroit. Now let's go back to watching it at home on my couch. My couch is free. I paid for it long term, so I guess it's free for the day. The beer for the fridge is about a buck fifty each. The pizza that I ordered to the door, I got it for $25 for the entire family. Now my bathroom is eight feet away. Unless I got really bad timing, I got zero wait time. My TV signal is HD with no buffering. My replay angles, I can actually see everyone, and I got a pause button. Holy shit, if I need to take a call or something like that. Now let's look at my total time invested. About three hours. My total cost for my whole family of four, about 30 bucks. So for 1747 less or so in about five fewer hours, man, I got a much better product at home. That's not a stadium experience problem. That's an everything about the stadium problem. Industry knows it. There's a stadium fan engagement firm called Iolabs. Their own marketing material published it last month. Okay, it literally says, and I got it right here. Watching from the couch has become remarkably good. Multiple camera angles, expert commentary, and zero bathroom lines make staying at home, staying at home, sorry about that, an appealing option for many fans. Stadiums can compete on picture quality or convenience. The company selling solutions to stadiums is telling you that the stadiums are losing. And the stadiums are doing nothing about it. They're just raising the prices anyway. So you know what these stadiums are now? They're expensive bad TVs. That's it. You're paying $1700 for an experience that the industry itself is admitting to you it's inferior to the free version at home. And we still do it because the atmosphere. Don't get me wrong, I love the fucking atmosphere. We'll get to the atmosphere in a minute, okay? We're gonna get to it because I agree with it and I appreciate it. But let's break down with my $1,700 actually going first. Because the leagues do a really good job of squeezing it in there. The stadium squeeze. $19 for a stadium beer. The same beer that cost me $250 at the grocery store. Mark up about $660. That's not concession pricing. That's daylight fucking robbery with a logo on the cup. I got a $40 parking spot and that's a really good deal for four hours in a lot that the team owns, that they build, using your tax dollars 60% of the time. So you pay for the lot through your taxes, and now you pay $40 to use the thing, you're already funded. Jeez. I got a $12 hot dog. The cost of the stadium is 60 cents to produce. It's a $2,000 markup for a hot dog. I got a $7 bottle of water. Water. They charge you for $7 for inside the stadium because they know I ain't gonna allow you to bring more than one bottle, if you're lucky, into the stadium. That's not a concession policy. Come on, that's ridiculous. I feel like I'm held hostage here for a second. And the tickets themselves, variable price, we all know this. It means they use AI-driven dynamic pricing. It charges you the absolute maximum you're willing to tolerate every single game. The same seat, same stadium. It costs you $80 in September, $400 in December. If the team is good and the opponent is hot, ticket prices vary. It's how it works. The price you pay depends on how much they think they can squeeze out of you. So when you add it all up, the $1,777 that you're paying for the Lions game isn't exactly paying for the game. It's paying for your tax breaks that the team got from the city, the stadium debt that the city is probably still paying off, the executive bonuses, player salaries, the exclusive vendor contracts where one beer company pays for the right to just gouge you. I got a Wi-Fi infrastructure that barely works, and I got bathroom lines that I'm standing there for 20 plus minutes. That's the actual transaction. $1,700. That game on the side, that's incidental. So here's all this, and you're like, okay, the atmosphere, dude. It's you're going to the game. Come on. You're yelling through your phone right now, and I hope you are. At least you're listening. But yeah, let's talk about the atmosphere because it's fucking real. I'm not going to pretend it isn't. I'm not going to sit here and be like, I don't believe that. That's not true. No, I am an avid fan. That's why I called the show the avid. I love the game. I still love the game. We might be talking about the things, the nil niches here and there that might be the game might need to be fixed, and that's where our passion comes from because we can see these things through our sets. We can see these things when we watch it on the replays. We can see these things when we watch our favorite teams go down the field. The atmosphere is real. I'm not going to pretend that it isn't. A roar of 70,000 people after a touchdown, the chance. Okay, we know what it's like. The energy of a sold-out playoff game. I've been there, being there, hearing that hit, smelling the grass, no matter what the sport almost is, it's all fucking real, and I love it and I get it. But let me just ask you this one question, honestly, okay? How many of those games actually deliver on the atmosphere? Now, if you're a fan of an average team, the kind of team that goes eight and nine most years, your home stadium is about half empty in October when the team's already out of contention. The atmosphere, it's not exactly the atmosphere. It's a guy named Steve from 314 fucking yelling at the refs while three rows behind you are they're just completely empty. If you're a fan of a tanking team and we've covered tanking last week, the front office is selling you tickets to watch your team lose on purpose. So what atmosphere is that? Sadness, quiet bitterness? I'm not really sure I get that. But the atmosphere argument only really works for maybe eight games a year across the NFL. Okay, playoff games we get, marquee matchups, yes, primetime games, of course. But the other 264 games, the ones you actually have a chance of buying tickets to, right? The ones you actually have a okay, the lions are playing the Falcons, maybe I can get a good C, right? Maybe I can squeeze in a couple extra bucks and sit in and have a better location. They those games, they're fun, yeah, but they don't have the same atmosphere. It's an attendance, it's a little different, it feels different. And the brutal honest truth is it's being engineered against you, it's being engineered against us. What the stadiums have done in the last 10 years, okay, they've added these massive LED screens just to manufacture noise. They're installing noise meters that prompt you to scream on cue. They play canned music over a real-time crowd response. The atmosphere isn't organic anymore, it's a product, it's stage managed, choreographed. The same way reality TV is real. You're not buying an atmosphere, you're buying a simulation of an atmosphere for $1,777. So what's going on? Why don't the stadiums just fix this? Why don't they make it actually compete with the home experience? So I got two reasons for you that I found out. And both will tell you everything about how the leagues see us. So the first one is they don't really have to. Stadiums are functional monopolies. There's exactly one Detroit Lions home stadium. If you want to see the Lions play in person, you gotta go to Ford Field. You don't get to see them otherwise. You don't get to see the Lions play. There's no competing Lions stadium that's charging 200 bucks instead of the 1700. They only have one product. You only either buy it or you sell it. They keep raising the price because that's the only constraint is what you'll tolerate. And we just keep tolerating it. And the second reason, the premium experience is subsidizing the bad ones. So the way that modern stadiums make money kind of changed a little bit. Most stadiums are now generating 70 to 80% of their revenue from these luxury suites, these club seats, these premium dining experiences, and of course, sponsorships. Not really your 1777. You, the regular fan in the upper deck, you're basically there for ambient decoration. You're filling the seats to make the broadcast look full. The actual business model is selling these private boxes to corporations and tax write-offs. That's why the bathroom lines are 20 minutes, why the Wi-Fi never works, why the concession stand has three workers for 5,000 people. Why the seats in the upper deck haven't been updated since 1998? You're just not the customer. We're set dressing. You're set dressing for the corporate suites. That's where the real customer's probably sitting. And we all know how the suites look. They got private bathrooms, private bartenders, private chefs, climate control comfort. Everything you're not getting, they're getting. That's it. That's where we are. So what do we do? How do we go about this? The cost of going to a live sporting event has gone up about 201% in about 10 years. It's a decade. The product, it's kind of gotten worse, and the industry is selling a product that it's publicly admitting the at-home version is better. And you're a lifelong fan. I'm an avid fan. You're an avid fan. We're all being charged about $17.77 to subsidize a luxury suite next door where someone you're never going to ever meet is writing off a tax deduction. This isn't a customer experience problem. This isn't a business model that has has decided regular fans are an acceptable loss. They got your tax dollars to build the stadium, they got your subscription dollars for the broadcast, they got your money for the jersey, and now they want your $17.77 for the game. If you've been to a stadium recently and felt vaguely cheated, it's probably why. You're not imagining it. You're being treated as overhead. We're funding an experience designed to please people who aren't really us. And if you're going to a game this fall, and I'll be honest, okay, I still go to, I love this game, I love being at the game, there's nothing like it. But let's just go in knowing what the transaction actually is. Okay, we're paying for the memory. We're paying for the smell of the grass, we're paying for the cold metal seat, okay, being there when the touchdown happens. We're not paying for a product, we're paying for an experience. Okay, it's op the league has openly decided not to improve it, but we get to enjoy this experience. Yes, the home version is just gonna keep on getting better. There is no denying it, the stadium version is probably gonna get more expensive. And honestly, one day, going to a game might feel like a thing only rich people do. Kind of like the opera or fucking Broadway. I don't know, corporate seats might just win, the regular fan might just lose, and the league could be fine with that. If this hits subscribe, share it with a friend who's about to drop $1,500 on Lions tickets. Drop your worst stadium moment in the comments. Did you have to pay a $19 beer? How long did you have to wait? 30 minutes for the bathroom? Wi-Fi couldn't get that fantasy score updated? I want to hear it. Next week on the avid, we got the replay reviewed disaster. Every game stops dead now for four minutes, so a guy in New York could just look at the same play for seven times. I hope to see you then, and until then, stay avid.