voyageur
Hockey fanatic
- Jul 10, 2011
- 10,082
- 8,932
This is a great post. I can say that I remember taking my younger brother to hockey games in Winnipeg and the upper deck tickets were no more than $30 for a pair.I mean, last season Winnipeg, with the smallest arena in the league, didn't sell out. Unfortunately, Quebec doesn't have the corporate base of other contending marketplaces. It sucks but basically the entire lower bowl of the Penguin games and all of the boxes (obviously) are filled with corporate sheep. The "real fans" were priced out of hockey when the game transitioned from strong niche sport to "big 4" in the late 90's early 2000's. My uncle was paying 20$ a game in 1992 for a level A seat and it was 120$ a ticket in 2000 --- those levels of inflation don't exist (well, they haven't for a while) in the everyday marketplace. (btw, that equivalent ticket is now 300 bucks).
In 1988, my uncle paid 10$ a ticket. Think about THAT. His first season he paid about 800 for tickets and his last season -- just ten years later -- he paid $7,790 ! (95$ a ticket). Btw, a dollar in 1988 was worth 1.38 in 1998 so, if his tickets had merely kept up with inflation, he should have been spending roughly $1,132 for his tickets in 1998. Instead, 1 NHL dollar in 1988 was worth 9.74 NHL dollars in 1998
But you hit a critical point. 1988 there was only 2 players in the league making over a million dollars per year. Gretzky and Lemieux.
Working class, beer drinking, rowdy fans could fill the rinks. Which is why the Nordiques outdrew the Bruins the 80s.
With Bettman the landscape changed. New arenas started popping up, with more luxury suites. Anaheim, San Jose, St. Louis, Boston, Chicago, Philly, Buffalo, Tampa. They became the model for every other team in the league to follow, as a source of greater revenue, and those teams with old character rinks, had to adapt, or relocate (Winnipeg, Minnesota, Hartford, Quebec).
The Canadian dollar was no longer used to pay players in Canada.
And more importantly the big players (owners) in the league started investing in players to win, and salaries skyrocketed, and subsequently ticket prices did too, and they kept rising to a point where blue collar workers were no longer the targeted audience.
