Personal Seat Licence
The second type of license fee is for acces to certain types of seats : luxury boxes, premium seating, and the like. Typically, financing plans use revenues from these sources to pay for the stadium. An especially interesting source of revenue is the personal seat license, whereby a customer pays a fixed fee to obtain the right to buy season tickets. PSLs can be perpetual, as they are for the new San Francisco Giants ballpark, but more commonly they cover a fixed period, such as the ten-year life of a PSL for tickets to the Oakland Raiders games. Likewise, the rights inhering in a PSL usually can be sold, but sometimes a change in ownership requires a payment to the team.
PSLs were first used by the Dallas Cowboys in 1968 to help finance Texas Stadium. Called « seat options », they were priced at $300 to $1,000 and had a life of forty years. The next use did not occur until 1986, when a variant of the PSL, called « charter seat rights », was used to collect advance ticket revenues of sufficient magnitude to persuade the NBA to expand to Charlotte, which it did by creating the Hornets. These revenues were converted to a down payment on the first years’s season tickets. ...suite
PSLs were first used by the Dallas Cowboys in 1968 to help finance Texas Stadium. Called « seat options », they were priced at $300 to $1,000 and had a life of forty years. The next use did not occur until 1986, when a variant of the PSL, called « charter seat rights », was used to collect advance ticket revenues of sufficient magnitude to persuade the NBA to expand to Charlotte, which it did by creating the Hornets. These revenues were converted to a down payment on the first years’s season tickets. ...suite
Source: Sports, Jobs and Taxes
Par: Roger G. Noll et Andrew Zimbalist
ISBN: 0-8157-6111-2
