Major League Baseball attendance will be down more than 6.5 percent this season, the biggest decline since Harry Truman was president, and we're guessing revenues declined by a much larger margin. The reaction from Bud Selig? It's the best of all possible worlds.
Major League Baseball attendance will be down more than 6.5 percent this season, the biggest decline since Harry Truman was president, and we're guessing revenues declined by a much larger margin. The reaction from Bud Selig? It's the best of all possible worlds.
Some of the decline was going to happen no matter what: both the Yankees and the Mets are playing in smaller ballparks. But there are large declines in other markets — the Nats are down some 22 percent, Detroit's down 21 percent heading into the final homestand of the season — and only Kansas City and Texas are up by more than 10 percent. When fans do go to games they're spending less and sitting in cheaper seats, as corporations scale back on their spending on season tickets and premium areas.
The real concern we're hearing about from MLB types isn't on the attendance front, but on the revenue front, where problems started last season when the recession started. Roughly speaking, a third of a team's revenues come from the gate, the rest from sponsorships, advertising and broadcast revenues. It's this part of the ledger book that is causing the most concerns: most large corporations aren't interested in the seven-digit sponsorships of years past, and the marketing world is going through a massive change that looks first to performance-based results rather than big, flashy but ultimately unquantifiable promotions possible through Major League Baseball. There's a big shift going on, and we're not entirely sure MLB types are ready for it. Indeed, the talk from the commissioner's office is that all will be hunky-dory once the economy rebounds.
"Given that we are in the worst economic recession since the Great Depression," Bud Selig told USA Today, "it is stunning. This year is a great testament to the huge popularity of our sport."
Perhaps. But as the marketing world changes, it will be interesting to see whether MLB's efforts to directly market to consumers — like game-day broadcasts on BAM — will be enough to offset the loss of marketing dollars.
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