Three Things I Learned in SaaS, Sports, Tech & Live Events 1.23.23
The Super Bowl market in Phoenix, the day the "snake pit" was shut down at the BCS Championship game and entrepreneur advice from John Dutton
The last time a Super Bowl went bonkers? 2015 in Phoenix. We wrote about it for USA Today here: https://ticketmanager.com/super-bowl-fraud/. It went so crazy SeatGeek and Vivid Seats made the decision to break orders and leave customers out of the game, while StubHub took the hit and filled their orders for customers. It's a crazy weekend every time in the desert with the Waste Management Phoenix Open and the Super Bowl in one place. In 2015, the market exploded when two ticket brokerages colluded to keep inventory off the market to break the smaller brokers who had sold tickets "on spec" (which means they sold tickets they didn't yet have for a price they thought they could beat as the game got closer). Eight years later, the market is much more consolidated with Endeavor's On Location Experiences (OLE) owning a sizable chunk of the market. OLE didn't get a ton of blockbuster match-ups in great locales under previous ownership, but this game is sizing up to be quite different. All four NFC teams remaining are very big draws and two of the AFC teams are as well. We'll see some bonkers pricing and, if any of the six marquee teams get in, we'll see some brokers lose their businesses (again.)
Events don't always get cheaper as they get closer as re-sellers don't care what you think about their math- trust me, the "snake pit" at the 2007 BCS Championship game in Phoenix taught me as much. In Arizona, scalping tickets at the game is not illegal, it is simply confined to a fenced off area called "the snake pit" where brokers stay inside the circle and consumers can enter to buy tickets. Police are there, with scanners, to make sure the crowd doesn't get unruly and to scan and verify tickets (this is back in '07 before tickets were all-digital). As the highly anticipated match-up between Urban Meyer's Florida Gators and Jim Tressell's Ohio State Buckeyes kicked-off, fans crowded the pit waiting for prices to fall. "Get-ins," the cheapest tickets, were going for $1300 dollars at kick-off. They didn't drop. We stayed and watched the action at the pit through the end of the first quarter. Fans grew unruly, yelling at the scalpers they were "going to eat their tickets." They didn't care, they'd made their money. After the hundreds of buyers started chanting "bring it down," as if they were entitled to a lower price, the police had seen enough. They shut down the snake pit and all those fans who had traveled hundreds, or thousands, of miles, were left out of the game.
"It's only reckless if you don't see it through" - John Dutton. Yup, that's entrepreneurship in a sentence. If it didn't appear risky and costly, someone would have done it by now. Train up, get prepped, then see it through. You'll be surprised what can happen.