Bills' ticket sales lag in Toronto
Preseason giveaways are cause for concern
Maybe the Buffalo Bills-Miami Dolphins regular-season game in Toronto on Dec. 7 will be a sellout that proves what a strong National Football League market Toronto is, even for exorbitantly priced tickets.
But for now, the Bills in Toronto experiment has a public relations nightmare on its hands, having to deal with widespread media reports that 15,000 — and maybe up to 17,000 — tickets had to be given away to create a “sellout” Thursday night.
And that, Toronto media claimed, could have translated into a loss of anywhere from $3 million to $5 million for Rogers Communications.
Rogers is paying the Bills $78 million to host eight games over five years, or an average of $9.75 million per game.
Thursday’s preseason game between the Bills and Pittsburgh Steelers drew an announced crowd of 48,434 in a stadium believed to seat slightly under 54,000 for the Bills games. That’s roughly 90 percent of capacity.
Last week, Bills in Toronto officials claimed that about 2,500 tickets had to be distributed Monday to “sell out” the game and lift the TV blackout in time.
But widespread anecdotal reports, circulated throughout the Toronto media, pegged the number of free tickets at four to six times that amount.
“We’re estimating something in the neighborhood of 15,000 [free tickets], and if we’re wrong, by all means, somebody from the Rogers empire can call and correct us,” popular Fan590 talk-show host Bob McCown said on the air Friday.
One source more familiar with the ticket-selling operation questioned the 15,000 figure, suggesting the more accurate range would be between 8,000 and 10,000 unsold tickets.
Whatever the figure, McCown outlined the challenge those unsold tickets create for the Bills in Toronto organizers in selling out the Dec. 7 Dolphins game.
“Who buys a ticket for the Buffalo Bills between now and Dec. 1?” McCown asked during the round-table discussion. “You’d have to be dumber than a post to buy a ticket, given the fact that they were giving ’em out like candy.”
Another member of the round table, who said he had bought four tickets for $550 each, then offered to sell his Bills-Dolphins tickets for half-price.
That’s better than the scalpers were doing Thursday. One ticket “broker” told The Buffalo News that he’d be lucky to get half-price. Other ticket vendors reported trying to sell tickets for 25 percent of the face value.
The tickets for the Toronto games range from $70 to $105 for upper-level tickets to $350 to $575 for VIP tickets. Officials have reported that the average ticket price for general seats — those not between the 20-yard lines in the lower bowl — is $183.
The predominant view in Toronto last week was summed up by former Buffalo News sportswriter Jim Kelley on Friday’s Fan590 round-table discussion: “The NFL will do very well in Toronto, but unfortunately someone grossly mispriced it.”
Officials from Rogers Communications could not be reached to comment Monday.
Bob Stellick of Stellick Marketing Communications, the media relations consultant for the Toronto games, wouldn’t hazard a guess about the number of tickets sold. But he suggested organizers knew the three preseason games would be tougher to sell than the five regular-season games.
“The preseason games essentially are a cost of doing business,” he said.
Stellick also said he believes Thursday’s game accomplished its main goal.
“We wanted people to leave the game wanting to come back Dec. 7, and we think we succeeded at that,” he said.
Everywhere you went in Toronto last week, Canadians wanted Buffalo media members to realize two things: that Canadians also found the prices too high, but they were confident that the interest in an NFL regular-season game would assure a sellout for the Dolphins game.
The Bills, who have handed over most of the Toronto logistics to Rogers officials, say they don’t know how many tickets had to be “distributed.”
But they think the eight-game series kicked off Thursday already has expanded the Bills brand into the huge Torontoarea market.
“From what we have seen, there has been a very large Canadian media interest, and not just in the [Toronto] games themselves, but in the whole season’s worth of Bills games,” said Scott Berchtold, the team’s vice president of communications.
The Bills have seen much greater interest in the team’s training camp in Pittsford. There seems to be more media interest in Bills games in Buffalo. And some media members from Ontario even want to cover Bills road games.
“There’s no question that we have a good fan base up there in Toronto, and I think it’s going to get bigger and better as it goes along,” Berchtold said. “That’s one of our goals, to increase the fan base there.”
