Five weeks from the opening of Mercedes-Benz Stadium, the Falcons say they have slightly less than 6,000 personal seat licenses still to sell.
Michael Drake, the Falcons’ senior vice president and chief revenue officer, expressed confidence that the PSLs will sell out and said there will be no single-game tickets available for purchase directly from the team this season.
Drake said that as of Thursday, 55,113 seat licenses had been sold, generating $256.3 million in revenue. That included 6,104 club seats for $131.5 million and 49,009 non-club seats for $124.8 million, he said.
The PSLs are one-time fees required for the right to purchase Falcons season tickets in the new $1.5 billion-plus stadium. The license fees range from $500 to $45,000 per seat, and no season tickets are available without a PSL.
The Falcons have said since beginning the seat-license sales in January 2015 that their goal was to sell out the stadium with season tickets, meaning the only way to buy single-game tickets would be from re-sellers on the often inflated secondary market.
The Falcons’ PSL sales seemed challenging at times during the past 2 1/2 years, but sales surged during the team’s Super Bowl run last season and have remained steady in recent months.
Mercedes-Benz Stadium opens with a Falcons-Arizona Cardinals exhibition game Aug. 26. The Falcons’ regular-season home opener is Sept. 17 against the Green Bay Packers.
“The run-up to this thing is going to be wild,” Drake said. “We’re at just about 90 percent sold-through.
“And that remaining 10 percent — I suspect we’ll (sell) 500-600 seats a week the next eight-10 weeks and probably closer to 700-800 a week in early September after the preseason games and will be finished up probably right about the first (regular-season home) game.”
Although the stadium has a seating capacity of about 71,000 for Falcons games, approximately 10,000 seats are excluded from the PSL program, such as those in suites, in sponsorship deals or set aside for players’ families, visiting-team officials, group sales to community organizations and other purposes.
That leaves about 61,000 seats that require PSLs, and based on the current sales figures, roughly 5,800 of those are still available for sale — perhaps slightly less, depending on how many seats are allotted for sale to community groups.
Asked what the Falcons will do with any seats in the PSL inventory that don’t sell as season tickets before the regular-season home opener, Drake said: “There won’t be any remaining inventory. That would be shocking to me at the rate we’re going and the trend we’re seeing, so I don’t have a plan for that. We’ll sell it out. And if we don’t, I guess I could add it to group inventory.”
But individuals who want single-game tickets will not be able to buy them from the team, he said.
“The downside of not having a PSL is you’re forced to go to the secondary market and purchase from the PSL holder who is posting a ticket,” he said.
“In this market, (fans) are used to buying single-game tickets from the team. We’re just not going to have them.”
Currently available seat licenses include some lower-bowl club seats, end-zone seats and upper-level corner seats, Drake said.
Revenue from the seat-license sales go toward the cost of building the 2-million-square-foot stadium.
In addition to the one-time seat license fees, Falcons season-ticket prices range from $55 to $385 per game.
TRACKING PSL SALES
The AJC has periodically obtained updates on Falcons personal seat license sales through open-records requests. How many PSLs the Falcons had sold for Mercedes-Benz Stadiuum through the following dates:
July 31, 2015: 12,997
Sept. 30, 2015: 22,434
Nov. 30, 2015: 26,617
March 31, 2016: 29,211
April 30, 2016: 29,835
July 31, 2016: 31,977
Aug. 31, 2016: 32,702
Nov. 30, 2016: 37,455
March 31, 2017: 48,189
May 31, 2017: 51,583
July 20, 2017: 55,113
Sources: Figure for July 20, 2017, is from Falcons, all others from Georgia World Congress Center Authority
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