I love Michelob Ultra.
2.6 grams of carbs, 4.2% ABV, and 93% water. Pairs extremely well with ballparks, stadiums, and arenas.
I bought one at the Argentina vs. Jordan World Cup match in Dallas last month. It cost $17.50. Proportionately, 1.1 ounces of the liquid I consumed was non-water.
I was in the middle of an absolutely electric evening, basking in the glory that is a live sporting event of that caliber. And yet, I walked away from the concession stand ticked off. That’s the type of pricing that doesn’t just make you think, “wow, that’s expensive” but “wow, that’s offensive.”
I’m not trying to sound like a cheapskate. Combined with $120 parking, these are some of the only things that can poke holes in the otherwise giddy fan experience in environments like these.
The spectacle and everywhere-all-the-time nature of live sports has never been bigger. It’s been on full display this summer with a star-studded NBA finals, the first US-hosted World Cup in 32 years, bloody hand-to-hand combat on the White House Lawn, and of course Wimbledon. And yet, access for fans has never felt harder.
I’m not talking about the six-figure courtside seats, midfield boxes, or Centre Court debentures. I’m talking about the ordinary cost of being a fan: concessions, parking, tickets, merch, and streaming (it cost over $1,000 to watch every NFL game last year across streaming providers). The fee-stacking and downright price gouging is an unrelenting beat down.
The structural expansion is real and it’s happening all around us. The NFL added a 17th regular-season game in 2021; an 18th is already on the table, and the overseas slate keeps growing — we’ll have nine games abroad this season, and the league has its eyes on sixteen. College football took the Playoff from four teams to twelve in 2024, and is openly debating a jump to as many as twenty-four by 2027. Several groups are finalizing bids for NBA expansion franchises in Las Vegas and Seattle — reportedly valued at $7 to $10 billion apiece, a windfall that would hand each of the league's thirty existing owners a check around $500 million simply for agreeing to split the pie two more ways. March Madness has scope creep too, with both the men's and women's tournaments expanding from 68 to 76 teams next year. More games, more rounds, more markets, more inventory.
Here’s the thing about all that expansion — it only happens because the appetite is insatiable. The growth is the proof of the hunger. The extractive price gouging is the wrong strategy because it’s the only thing that could possibly alienate a team's most ravenous customers: the fans.
Teams and leagues need to be less like Ticketmaster, and more like Costco.
Costco’s iconic hot dog combo has been priced at $1.50 since 1985, and it is beloved. A recent Instagram video of CEO Ron Vachris ordering one and saying “The hotdog price won’t change as long as I’m around” has 18.5 million views and nearly 1 million likes. The point of the Costco Dog — which would be around $5 adjusted for inflation — has never been the margin.
The point is you walk out feeling like you got away with something, so you come back next weekend, and you renew the membership, and you do it for thirty years. Low margin, high trust, repeat business. There is a reason Costco has a world-class NPS score.
One sports group is already running this play beautifully, and it’s Arthur Blank’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. It has $2 hot dogs, $3 pizza, $5 beers, free refills — the same prices since the doors opened in 2017, and it even managed to stiff arm FIFA and hold strong through the World Cup.
What may at first glance sound like a charity to the fans has had the opposite effect. The first year Atlanta cut concession prices by 50%, per-fan spending increased 16% and the stadium ranked number one in the league in fan satisfaction. Understanding consumer psychology allows you to win the relationship and better monetize the appetite that everyone else is trying to strip-mine.
And to be clear, none of this means flattening the top end. Keep the ultra-luxury suites and front rows for the people who will pay anything and never once glance at a price tag. That revenue is real, and I’d never tell anyone to leave it on the table. But don’t let the core product — the ordinary fan’s night — get quietly chipped away.
There’s no real strategy behind price gouging when fan demand runs as deep as it does. It’s merely impatient greed and failure to play the long game with the exact people whose passion is the only reason any of this is worth billions in the first place.
Now, to acknowledge a rebuttal to all of this: nobody’s actually staying home. The stadiums are full. Some teams have season ticket waiting lists that are a decade long. Media rights deals and franchise valuations continue to climb to new record highs. Fans complain about the $17.50 beer and then promptly buy the $17.50 beer. If people were really being pushed too far, wouldn’t the numbers say so?
That’s exactly why this up-and-to-the-right moment matters – because nothing looks broken yet. I’m writing this because I believe that if this continues, things eventually will. Revealed preference is a lagging indicator that tells us what people tolerated last season, not what they’ll walk away from next decade. A packed stadium and a quietly eroding one look identical from the owner’s box, right up until they don’t.
For the 2025 season, a family of four could expect to pay $1,898.02 to attend a Lions game at Ford Field with four of the cheapest tickets, two 16-ounce beers, two 20-ounce sodas, four hot dogs and parking. The median household income in Detroit is $39,938.
When that stadium fills up 70,000 strong on Sundays in the fall, a lot of those seats are being financed — the splurge going on a credit card, the debt racked up. Reckless, maybe. But understandable, because for many of these people, there is genuinely nothing on Earth they would rather spend that money on.
A stadium is the last room in America where billionaires and bricklayers stand under the same roof and lose their voices for the same team. It would be a tragedy if the next era of sports slowly priced its back rows all the way out, until the only people left are the ones who were never really stretching to be there.
Most teams and leagues are running an extractive model where they maximize every touchpoint, fragment the access, raise prices until they finally hit resistance. It works, but has an expiration date. The damage never shows up on a statement they’ll read this year.
The alternative is the endurance model: deliberately underprice the things people notice, eat a thinner margin on the hot dog to win the decade on the membership, and build a place people want to spend time (and, not coincidentally, money) inside. One model treats the fans as transactions to be maximized. The other treats them as a relationship to be compounded. With media rights deals, expansion fees, and the biggest stars in history in their uniforms, there has never been more room to fund the second model.
The best operators guard the endurance model like zealots. Vachris is just the latest to hold that line at Costco. Years ago, then-CEO Craig Jelinek floated raising the price of the $1.50 hot dog to cofounder Jim Sinegal. Sinegal didn’t debate the unit economics. He said, “If you raise the f*cking hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out.”
That sounds unhinged until you understand what he was actually protecting. The hot dog is the proof — the small yet unmissable signal that this is a place not trying to get one over on you. Raise it and you don’t just cost the customer a quarter; you break the perception. That’s the part leagues need to keep in mind – pricing isn’t only hitting fans’ wallets, it’s rearranging how they feel about the whole enterprise. Fan goodwill is an asset that compounds and should not be extracted from. Squeeze it for near term ARPU, and you end up damaging the LTV.
This is not some anti-capitalist manifesto. I want these leagues to be worth more, not less. It’s just the feedback of an enthusiastic patron, one who’d like them to thrive for decades and decades.
The fan appetite is real. The money is spectacular. I hope it never stops. But more, chased mindlessly, is exactly how you lose the people whose love for the game made the whole thing valuable in the first place.
Easy now.
ICYMI: This week’s podcast episode with 4x NBA Champion John Paxson, former Chicago Bulls player, coach and GM ⬇️
BONUS: Check out the first installment of Clubhouse with Dominyck Bullard (Athletiverse), Matthew Jester (CNC Partners), and me:
I publish an essay every other Thursday.
Stay tuned and share this with someone who should be paying attention to where the Sports Economy is headed.
If you’re building, investing, or advising within the Sports Economy — please reach out!
Email: [email protected]
– Brent
