Can’t keep ‘em away: Sports fans still find time, money for games in bad economy

Even in bad economy, sports fans love their games

Sports fans are familiar with pain that’s supposed to end their love affair with the game. There are the labor spats between billionaire team owners and millionaire athletes. The off-field antics that land players in handcuffs. The losing seasons.

Now, the Great Recession has sapped our wealth and ushered in an era of high unemployment and consumer frugality. It’s put an end to many unnecessary luxuries and made people more cautious about spending on everyday items, too.

Yet sports fans — as they always do — are still coming back to the ballpark.

The worst recession since World War II has dented but not ended America’s passion for sports. Much of the hit has been to skyboxes and the most expensive seats. For the most part, fans are still opening their wallets and going to games.

Exhibit A: the new NFL season. Led by the Dallas Cowboys, who put 105,000-plus in their new, $1.15 billion stadium on opening night, the league sold out 45 of the first 48 games of 2009.

Baseball? Attendance is down about 7 percent, but still nearly even with 2005, when the economy was booming.

Tennis’ U.S. Open drew record crowds in New York last month.

And those who don’t attend the games still look for ways to take part: CBS Sports.com reports about a 15 percent increase in fantasy football sign-ups, with many players paying $20 or more for a season’s worth of interactive fun.

It’s all in keeping with a trend that has endured through decades of strikes, lockouts and economic turndowns.

“What we’re always finding out is that fans are going to consume sports in a passionate manner,” says Wayne McDonnell, who teaches about sports and the economy at the New York University Tisch Center. “It might not be with the frequency they once did, but they are still going.”

Major League Baseball, which bore the full brunt of the recession this season, can attribute at least part of its 7 percent attendance decline to both the New York Yankees and Mets moving into smaller ballparks.

Last month, an Associated Press-Knowledge Networks poll found 32 percent of baseball fans had attended an MLB game last year, compared with 27 percent this year. At the time, nearly a quarter of fans said it was somewhat or very likely they’d get to a ballpark before the end of the season.

Todd Tompkins of Pinckney, Mich., sat behind first base at Comerica Park on Tuesday, watching his Detroit Tigers start a critical series against the Minnesota Twins in a city ravaged by economic blows. Michigan’s unemployment rate, the highest in the nation, is 15.2 percent.

“I’m not a season-ticket holder, but I’ll be here all week, and that will be 32 games this season. The economy hasn’t hurt me, but you can see it in the (smaller) crowds this year,” the 34-year-old Tompkins says.

Fans want to see their teams in action for some of the same reasons movies also traditionally do well in tough economic times: People need a place to escape, to feel they’re part of something.

The Cowboys drew 105,121 fans to the opening of their new stadium in September, all of whom can tell their kids and grandkids they were there for the beginning.

The U.S. Open still caters to a wealthier, see-and-be-seen crowd — and 721,059 attended over 15 days to see, be seen and watch a little tennis. Ticket prices at Flushing Meadows largely stayed the same as in 2008 — $22 was the cheapest and $800 for courtside — and no ticket price went down.

But many team owners who hoped to profit handsomely from premium seats and fine dining are finding less-than-expected demand for those luxuries in these hard times.

The Yankees sold about 95 percent of available seats at the team’s new stadium, but most of the unsold tickets were the most expensive ones, according to Yankees President Randy Levine.

The team also took a PR hit when it charged $2,500 for prime tickets. But like many franchises, it adjusted — slashing prices for the premium seats and announcing the price of about 6,500 seats will drop for the 2010 season.

Fans adjusted, too.

“Sports didn’t do well at the beginning of this,” McDonnell says. “We saw furloughs, massive layoffs. As the recession grew over the past few months, teams adapted their strategies, started doing things to try to win back fans by making it more affordable and economical.”

The Oakland A’s doubled the number of $2 seats available for Wednesday games at the start of the 2009 season. The Tigers added more $5 tickets and $5 parking. The NBA, long worried that the average fan was being priced out of the game, saw the number of cheap seats — $10 or less — double from an average of 500 to about 1,000.

Meanwhile, for the $20 (or more) it can cost to join a league with their buddies, football fans can get a season’s worth of entertainment without heading to the stadium. Fantasy football is a billion-dollar business that allows fans to build their own teams and compete against their friends.

“We’ve found people will continue to pay the price of a movie ticket for a quality fantasy sports experience,” says CBS Sports.com senior vice president Jason Kint.

Of course, as the pain caused by the recession begins to fade, there still are ways that fans could be alienated.

Friction over the NFL’s collective bargaining agreement, which expires at the end of next season, could lead to the first work stoppage since 1987 in America’s most popular sport.

“You could see a lot of fans being jarred and alienated rather quickly,” McDonnell says. “They could look back at an economic situation and say, ‘I committed $300 to going to a football game and what do I have to show for it?’ It’s millionaires fighting billionaires over percentage points on gross revenues.”

But American fans have a history of returning from those setbacks, too.

MLB attendance dropped 20 percent the season after a strike washed out the World Series in 1994. It took 12 years and the addition of four new teams for the numbers to get back to those levels — but eventually, they did.

The NHL missed the 2004-05 season because of a lockout. The league has set an attendance record every season since.

Same story with the economy. In the early 1980s, then again in the early 1990s, baseball attendance remained relatively steady despite economic setbacks.

“Recession is over,” says Minnesota Twins fan Matt Hepokoski, who drove two hours with his family to see a game at the soon-to-be-vacated Metrodome.

He figures he’ll make the trip again next year, when the Twins start playing in new Target Field.

“They’ll kind of have a free pass for a year or two for the new stadium,” Hepokoski says.

AP Sports Writers Dave Campbell in Minneapolis and R.B. Fallstrom in St. Louis contributed to this report.