Giants Having Trouble Selling Seats at New Stadium

Long waiting list has been exhausted

For years it has been something of a badge of honor to be a Giants season ticket holder. The tickets were held closely within families, included in wills and battled over in divorce cases because if you gave them up there wasn't much chance of getting your mitts on another set of them anytime soon. The waiting list for tickets reached into six figures and few, if any, said no when the rare opportunity arose.

Enter the personal seat license. The Giants are forcing people who want tickets to purchase PSLs when they move into their new stadium in 2010, a move that was met with much hostility when it was first announced. Time hasn't healed the wounds.

According to Neil Best of Newsday, the team has contacted as many of the 140,000+ people as they could find, but haven't found enough buyers to sell out at the $20,000, $12,500 or $7,500 price points. Best says that the Giants haven't yet started to offer the PSLs to the general public but "there is a strong likelihood that if you show up with a $20,000 check, the Giants will take it."

The Jets aren't quite as far along in the process as the Jets, but they have plenty of seats available as well.

The state of the economy is often used as a reason for slow ticket sales, and that's probably accurate, but the fact that the teams market these PSLs as investments is part of the problem as well. There are no immediate earnings realized on owning a PSL, nor any of the tax advantages to buying other kinds of assets, and once you add in the cost of tickets per game over X number of years it is difficult to foresee a considerable return on the money you're plunking down for the right to plunk money down.

The Giants and Jets don't care if you make money, they only care about paying for the construction of their building. The investment angle is the best card they can play, but there don't appear to be too many people getting on board with their view.

Josh Alper is a writer living in New York City and is a contributor to FanHouse.com and ProFootballTalk.com in addition to his duties for NBCNewYork.com.

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