Chiefs President Mark Donovan explains ticket pricing approach

Chiefs team president Mark Donovan recently detailed their ticket pricing approach for 2020.

The Kansas City Chiefs are, as of press time, one of a few teams confirmed to allow fans to attend games for the 2020 season—at least as of right now. The Chiefs announced a policy that will allow for 22 percent of the total seats at Arrowhead Stadium to be filled by fans in social pods—small groups that will keep parties socially distanced in compliance with safety regulations for the COVID-19 pandemic.

This means that a normally raucous stadium filled to the brim with well over 75,000 fans will now have approximately 16,000 fans in pockets all around the stadium. Given the attendance at Arrowhead in the past, in years that didn’t follow a Super Bowl victory, tickets would have already been difficult to find with such a drop in fan allowance already. But now that the Chiefs are the hottest ticket in football, prices have skyrocketed accordingly.

Some Chiefs fans have taken to social media to complain about the team’s ticket prices, and many rumors have surfaced about price gouging or the team unfairly raising prices in order to make money in the wake of the pandemic. Team president Mark Donovan says he understands the shock and/or frustration on the part of fans, and he took the time to address that with reporters on Wednesday.

Donovan says it began with season ticket holders and doing the hard work of making things fair for them going forward.

"“What we did in putting together our plan for how we take a stadium for 76,000 seats down to 16,000 seats and equally and fairly distribute those tickets to our season ticket members. As you can imagine when you do the math pretty quickly, you can’t.“What we did was we said all season ticket members would have a opportunity to move their tickets to ’21. There will be benefits and incentives to do that: we locked in their pricing—flat pricing—for next year, they have the opportunity to win free tickets to games, there are a lot of different benefits that our season ticket sales staff has done a great job on."

Donovan did say that the Chiefs put together their ticket pricing based on having a full stadium, before they knew that the majority of seats would go unfilled. Thus the Chiefs aren’t gouging their loyal fans here. However, they are in keeping with the market, as Donovan noted that fans can make quite a bit of money simply by buying a ticket only to resell it on the secondary market. Here’s his full explanation:

"“Then we sat down and said, ‘How do we make this fair and equitable among the tickets that we do have?’ On the pricing issue, in May when our schedule was released, we announced our single game ticket prices. In May when we announced those prices, we assumed we were going to have 76,000 people in the stadium and those prices were based on a lot of very complicated algorithms and data that we use to understand the market and understand what the value of those tickets are in this market.“Before we reduced to 16,000 seats, before we went through any of these changes, we set those prices. We haven’t changed those prices. They are exactly what they were. Those are single game prices and they’re based on the value of those tickets in the marketplace."

Overall, some Chiefs fans likely weren’t prepared for the market leap due to the team’s overall stars and success. Having Patrick Mahomes as the most popular player in the National Football League is going to create unprecedented demand, especially if he’s leading a team intent on defending their position as Super Bowl champs.

"“We completely understand and expected the response, because it is a significant jump. Number one, that’s the value of having a season ticket plan. You have the benefit of those prices being much below market value, but you’re committed to the full season. The single game option gives you the option to pay a little more, in some cases a lot more, because you’re buying one game. So you’re not obligated to buy a full season. You’re buying one game and you’re paying what the market rate is.”"

The Chiefs open the NFL season on Thursday Night Football with their home opener on September 10 against the visiting Houston Texans.